Thoughts on Teaching Yoga and Philosophy

Dallas Day One

2012-02-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

Jeff and I are up in Dallas for the Mary and Eddy workshop. We came up Tuesday in time for George's class. George Purvis is an amazing teacher. Super nice guy and super knowledgeable about yoga. We basically had a three person private lesson with us and Jason. What a luxury to have a senior teacher look that closely at your poses. It really boggles my mind that more people don't take advantage of the enormous resource that is George Purvis at BKS Iyengar Studio of Dallas.

Here's the sequence, long AMVira, AMS, AMvrk, regular, palms out, palms in, palms turned all the way back, interspersed with UHs to refresh the arms. long chair dwi pada, Pincha. variation of eka pada rajakapotasana 2, with back toe turned under at the wall, hands holding onto chair, long holds on both side, this is brutal with the foot turned like this, give it a try sometime. Ustrasana rolled stikcy in front of knees, go back keeping pelvis at wall, Scorpion holding onto the chair and he taught a neat foot kicking trick to hook the feet, AMS sirsasana, dropping over to dwi pada upto to Urdhva D 8 to 10 times, Jason flipped back over a couple times and George helped Jeff with standing up, I rested... then viparti karani (with long discourse about the movie war horse).

Fun times. Off to Randy's class.

Some quotes about philosophy

2012-01-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

" Philosophy-no problem too trivial, no answer too obscure."

This is a t-shirt from the UT philosophy department. I saw a philosopher wearing it both Saturday and Sunday. How do I know it was a philosopher? Let's just say the image conformed to my stereotypical view of the philosopher making his way in a non-academic setting.

The shirt is funny in a way, clearly analytic philosophy making fun of itself here, which is better than when it simply takes itself seriously, but it does speak to a fundamental difference in various approaches to philosophy that are worth thinking about at some length.

Analytic philosophy does tend to view the philosophical task as a set of problems to be solved and the answers and indeed, the problems themselves can get pretty obscure. What is a philosophical problem you might ask? You know free will and determinism, the problem of evil, the mind body problem, turing tests, chinese boxes, possible worlds..is time travel possible? Zeno's paradox, the Euthyphro problem.

By the way, If you want to read a very funny blog written by the wife of a UT grad student go here to the philosologist blog a few posts back she has a totally hilarious characterization of the various strains of philosopher

I am not an analytic philosopher. Never have been. The problems approach is not what drew me to philosophy, though I do remember testing out Zeno's paradox on the playground in second grade. Plato's dialogues drew me to philosophy. I simply fell in love with them. (this is a very short version of a long story, the first installment of which will be published soon).

By and large, the students in my most excellent Plato seminar are here for the analytic philosophy. Baylor was not always a hot bed of analytic philosophy, but it has moved steadily in that direction for over a decade now and I would say it has solidly arrived in its promised land, as demonstrated by rankings on various reports.

I really don't mean to undermine this achievement in anyway. Truly, it is quite remarkable. If you build it, they will come. Baylor went about building it, and it is built very well, in a remarkably short period of time.

However, the current state of affairs presents something of a challenge to me pedagogically. As a group, individually and collectively they are by far and away the most intelligent group of graduate students I've worked with in my twenty years of teaching. There are no weak links in the chain. They are well bonded and conversation flows easily. And that in and of itself, is simply a lot of fun. It is fun teaching super intelligent, highly engaged students. At the same time, the majority of them, not all, simply do not do philosophy in the way that I do it so I'm having to present my way of doing philosophy along with presenting Plato and my way of doing Plato.

Now some analytic philosophers are interested in Plato, indeed, the dominant mode of Plato scholarship is done by analytic philosophers, but they tend to be interested in the arguments in the dialogues or differently put, the problems that arise when considering the arguments in the dialogues.

Plato and Socrates were more philosophy as a way of life philosophers. They tended to view philosophy as an ongoing process of self-examination that led one to a deeper understanding, of self, other, world, society, and the fundamental principles that under gird reality. They did not so much see this process as a set of problems but sustained inquiry into the nature of who am I and what is.

Here are a couple philosophical problems that Socrates was concerned with "What sort of creature am I?" "What sort of wisdom do I have that the oracles says no one is wiser?" They are problems, sure, but they are problems that are inexorably bound to the meaning of life for him. When I was in high school, the cross country team had a great t-shirt. it is a quote from the Phaedo. "How curious is this thing called pleasure and how closely related to pain." Again, a sort of problem, the relationship of what we take to be opposite experiences, but it is what Socrates remarks when reflecting on the chains that hold him in his prison cell as he awaits the moment for his death by hemlock.

One of my former teachers Carl Vaught often said that "philosophy is not a set of problems to be solved but a paradox to be deepened." A paradox to be deepened over the course of a lifetime.

Monday Mid Day

2012-01-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

Jeff and I had a pretty fun weekend. I had a blast at Friday Practice. There were a good number of us present and so that added some extra energy to things and I had some really good linking insights going through the PW sequence again. Then we met Dad and Mom at Hyde park Grill to celebrate Dad's 74th birthday. We had a nice time and talked some about various childhood memories I about the death of Dad's parents, which doesn't seem like it would be fun, but we laughed a good bit at our various foibles and it was fun.

Saturday Farmer's Market, working out and yoga. Sunday yoga, long walk with Milo on the green belt and working out.

Jeff and I have both been engaged in healthier life style habits this year and have been doing a good job of sticking with it thus far.

I had a very strange dream in the middle of the night, I think it was watching Downton Abbey and Sherlock Holmes before bed. I dreamed a lot about death in various forms anyway, it left me a bit unsettled so I got up and did some supine pranayama and finally went back to sleep. Have felt a bit uneasy all day, but am going about doing my various Monday tasks, in addition to getting ready to go to Dallas for the week. Mary and Eddy start Tuesday, but Jeff and I and Milo are going up Tuesday so we can take some classes from George and Randy also. Anyway, as always, going away involves getting all my ducks in a row on the front end which is what I've been doing most of the day.

I had a nice time teaching Cue and Dorothy this morning. They are very engaged students. It is a good lesson in keeping an active engaged life and mind as one ages and goes through life.

So nothing deeply philosophic on this particular blog except some mild self-examination about abnihivesha in its various forms, dreams, memory, practice.

Here's what's on the docket for yoga classes this week.

AMVira
AMS
Utt
Malasana
Utt
Dandasana
Navasana
Ardha Navasana
Dandasana
Supta 1
Ubhaya Padangustasana

Lolasana

Dandasana
MI
Eka Hasta Bhujasana
Dandasana

Supta I
Urdhva Prasarita Padasana

AMS
AMVrk
PM
Sirsasana
Chair Dwi Pada
Salamba Sarvangasana I
Salamba Sarvangasana II
Jathara Parivartansana (legs bent)
savasana

Busy Week

2012-01-27T09:23:00.000-08:00

Wow, it is finally Friday. I've had a busy week. We are in the process of interviewing for a position in the BIC so we've been interviewing candidates, observing teaching and the like. It is also tenure review season, annual review season, and I've in fact being reviewed as my three year stint as BIC director is drawing to a close. If all goes well, I'll do it for another three years.

Anyway, I guess what's "on my mind" in Facebook status language is the concept of evaluation and judgement and the importance of discernment. In yogic terms, discernment is viveka, it is basically the quality of mind that we develop through yoga practice that enables us to determine true from false, real from not real, good from evil, purusha from prakriti. In many ways, viveka is what keeps us on the path and without it we get lost.

So I've been thinking a lot about the capacity to discern, in terms of evaluating progress toward tenure, evluating performance, evaluating my "job satisfaction." I'm enjoying the challenges of the new job a great deal, but at the same time I've really been reinforced in my view of my "dharma as teacher." In many ways, directing BIC is teaching on a macro level. A lot of what I enjoy about the job is mentoring young faculty through the tenure process and there is a lot of telling and sharing what I've learned. I was actually talking with Sam and Candi about it at the New Menoring dinner. It is different than how I typically teach philosophy in that I'm just pretty straight forward about this is the lay of the land as I see it. In the philosophy context, I try to be a bit more Socratic, in the sense that I present ideas but I more try to create a context where the discussion of ideas occurs. So part of me likes the straightforward approach. There's another aspect to the teaching dimension of BIC in the sense that I have the opportunity to think and to a certain extent bring about, good pedagogy more globally, in terms of reshaping curriculum and encouraging active engagement in the classroom etc.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the office typing up some administrative request and a student came by looking for his keys. I told him to wait a couple minutes and I would help him look in the front office. I went out and he and a friend were sitting patiently. They asked if I was "BIC Director" and I said "yes." I asked if they were BIC students, yes. first year. They like the BIC and they said "thank you for the BIC." Now that was pretty cool, but I'm just a small part of BIC, its my turn at the directing of it but it evolved over close to a thirty year period from its initial seed existence as a response to a university self study, chaired by my good friend and mentor Bob Baird, to where it is now as one of four programs in the honors college.

That's one of the things I like most about BIC, is that I feel like I'm part of a large team working toward a common aim.

But it is still a different feeling for me than the feeling of being in the classroom talking with students about Plato. There's something very deep in my soul that knows "this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing." That's dharma and it is quite different from "job satisfaction." I'm one of the lucky ones in a sense that my "job" and my "dharma" overlap a great deal, but I think it is important to keep the concepts and my experience of them distinct.

This came up in a different way in one of my philosophy student's blogs. Karl Aho, you can check out his blog post here

He was asking about how to maintain the leisure necessary to philosophize when pursuing professional philosophy and I answered him on the blog, but it strikes me that it is a good parallel with one's own personal yoga practice and what goes on in the yoga classroom. There's an overlap sure, but you have to cultivate the space in your life for practice without its public context.

Sequences for the week and other thoughts about the 8 limbs of yoga

2012-01-24T05:08:00.000-08:00

It's the fourth week of the month, where the pedagogical focus of Iygengar public classes is pranayama. What is pranayama you might ask? Literally, the word means something like extension of prana or energy. Breath is one manifestation of prana, but the scope of prana is pretty much all pervasive.

Patajali has five sutras that talk about Pranayama directly (though there are sutras in the list of meditative techniques that are clearly talking about pranayama).

Pranayama is the 4th limb of yoga, it comes after yama, niyama, asana. It is the first limb where any temporal distinction about the order of practicing the limbs occurs.

Patanjali writes (I am using Edwin Bryant's translation here), "When that (asana) is accomplished pranayama, breath control (follows). This consists of the regulation of the incoming and outgoing breaths" (ii. 49).

How does one know when asana is accomplished? When the effort to to it becomes effortless according to BKS' translation (or by the relaxation of effort and absorption in the infinite, according to Edwin's translation).

Or perhaps when one is not afflicted by the dualities of the opposites" (II.48).

That sounds like a pretty high starting point and in a sense it is, but I've also been taught that basically, start pranayama when you have some daily asana practice well established.

One of the biggests lessons I took from my recent studies with Swati Chanchani is that all asana is a preparation for pranayama, or differently put, one should look at asana from the perspective of developing a pranayama practice, so is the spine straight, are the hips level, how to the arms and legs work to faciliate the necessary openness in the hips to sit straight and the necessary openness in the chest to breathe well and overall the presence of mind to begin focusing on the breathe.

As an aside, at a recent Patricia workshop, Patricia asked us to paraphrase the sutras in our own words and the one I had was ii.49. I sort of jokingly paraphrased it as "when your asana practice is good enough, then you can start worrying about the breath."

Patanjali goes onto explain the parts of the breathing process is 11.50 and 11.51 and then he outlines the effects of pranayam, "then the covering of illumination is weakened and the mind becomes fit for concentration" (11.52-53).

Another way of thinking about pranayama is that it is a bridge between the outer work of yama, niyama, and asana and the inner work of concentration, meditation, and samadhi. Maha Mudra perfectly symbolizes this transitional state in that it is both a pose and a pranayama. so today in class we'll work again toward Maha Mudra, vanquisher of death...

Here's the sequence from Monday at San Marcos and the further development of it for class today listed in bold. Just FYI San Marcos class is all levels including beginner and Castle Hill is in theory Level 2-3, though there are a couple beginners in there as well.

Arm work (UH, UB, Paschima)
AMS
Goumukasana full pose.
AMS
some work at the bar to open the chest
AMVrk
PM prep
PM
Sirsaana
Chair Dwi pada
setu bandha
Sarvangasana, walking up the wall, working toward Sarvangasana II
Maha Mudra
savasana legs in chair

Off to do some morning yoga with Jeff before a busy Tuesday begins.

Sophrosune, Yoga, Modes of Knowledge and Various other thoughts on Tamale Tuesday

2012-01-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

I had a great time teaching at the Castle this morning. Again, the level of studentship is so high. It is truly a delight to inherit this class of dedicated students. The level of studentship is different than the high level of studentship down in San Marcos. This class has definitely had more access to yoga on an ongoing basis and probably a more thorough grounding in Anusara than anything else. I think they are really ripe for Iyengar yoga and the precision and refinement that it offers. But the San Marcos group is just excited about yoga being in their town and they are simply eager to learn. Both groups are already interested in the subject and so that makes the teaching job very easy on one level and very challenging on the other in that I want to meet the interest and take the interest further. But there's a remarkable lack of resistance to the pedagogical process in both groups. Truly a delight.

In other pedagogical contexts, say intro to philosophy, or intro to yoga, a lot of the pedagogical work is just getting people interested in the subject. There are a variety of ways to do this, but demonstrating your own enthusiasm for said subject goes a long way toward instilling it in others.

A new student came to class today, new to me, not new to yoga and she raised for me and in class some good questions about studentship. Let's say you go to class and hear X (that your head should be in the palm of your hand in sirsasana, true to an extent, but not at the expense of collapsing the wrist which is what teacher Y was teaching on this particular tuesday morning You've got a take home message you leave with, which if you leave with a take home message at all, puts you way ahead of the curve, but it doesn't really tell you how to integrate the next take home message.

then you go to class and hear Y "shrug your shoulders in sarvangasana" and then come to class Z and hear "tuck your shoulders well underneath you." Those might seem like very different and in fact conflicting instructions. And to an extent they are, I don't think either of these pairs I've presented are ultimately irresolvable, but it takes a while to learn how to do that for yourself, particularly if you aren't committed to a parituclar method.

In fact, this very good student said just that "well it is confusing." You hear one thing here and another thing there." Or something to that effect.

That got me thinking about what the Sutras have to say on this score. The sutras list the five main vrittis, fluctuations that may or may not disturb our path to samadhi. The first one is actually pramana, correct knowledge. Now on the face of it correct knowledge would seem like something entirely conducive to samadahi, but here different presentations of "correct" knowledge are actually causing vrittis that are disturbing.

So how to know what correct knowledge really is. Patanjali again offers some guidlines. He says there are three types of knowledge we can trust. Authority, direct experience and inference. Authority could be a teacher or a text or even revelation I imagine. direct experience, what you yourself learn from practice and what you can logically infer from either of the above two cases.

So you have to make sure you are studying with a trusted authority, How do you know you are? Well here, I'm more of a Platonist than an aristotlean, I think there is a part of us that knows that because we have always already known all that we need to know we've just forgotten it.

But Study with people who teach from their own direct practice. Study with people who know more than you do. Study with people who study with people who know more than they do. Study with people who you trust to lead you on the path. Don't study with people because it is convenient for your schedule or because they are popular.

How does all this relate to sophrosune, the virtue of temperance or modesty or self-control? Well, we have to cultivate the quality of discernment in ourselves, through our own practice to be able to ascertain what is the case. This requires a certain level of humility and patience. Learning takes a long time. There can be flashes of insight along the way, but we have to be patient to learn what the overall practice has to teach us.

There's more to say as always, but it is time to hang out with my husband for the evening. Cheers.

San Marcos Sequence Week III

2012-01-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

I had a great time teaching in San Marcos last night. The level of engaged studentship down there is very high and it is really a delight to teach. Last night we took a trajectory through some backbending type poses with an eye toward doing sarvangasana,

it went something like this, Vajrasana, Tadasana, UH, UB, used strap on elbows to help get arms straight in UH. AM, paschima UB, used strap behind back to open chest and shoulders. AMS with strap. Vira I, front foot at wall, Vira I back foot at wall, used strap behind back to help get torso verticality and chest opening, Prasarita Padotassana I and II (with hands on hips) Salabasana variation with strap for hands to pull back, Chatushpadasana, Halasana, Sarvangasana, Savasana.

I showed Craig the staggered shoulderstand blanket set up and that seemed to help his neck. Overall, I kept my mind on sarvangasana and used that pose as a means for linking the other poses.

My plan for the castle today is similar, but I want to get to dropping over into setu bandha. So we are going to do a bit more behind the back arm work and look at parsva dhanurasana and ustrasana as well.

more on that later. blog time for the morning is up.

Santosha

2012-01-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

Last post, I mentioned ahimsa. Ahimsa is one of the five yama, the univeral ethics principles that guide our interactions with others. Today, one of the niyamas is on my mind, santosha, contentment. Niyamas, simply put, are principles that guide or interaction internally. Not that these are distinct realms, but I find it useful to think about ethics both as how I comport myself with respect to others and also in terms of what I do with respect to self-comportment.

For example, I like many people, have a inner samsakara that says, do more work harder, be better, a very future oriented outlook and it is a great deal of work for me to stay focused on the present moment and not get overwhelmed by all I think I have do to.

The niyama that addresses this tendency is santosha, contentment. Yesterday, I was listening to Patrica Walden's reading of Light on Life and in that book BKS remarks, that we should be content with even "a little progress." Of course, he also says we should strive to continual improve but to do it with contentment. Then, I was practicing Ardha Matysendrasana yesterday in a class and low and behold I could feel the inside of my pelvic bone with my back hand. Now I was not holding the inner thigh mind you, but I did get the other side of the pelvic bone which is clearly on the way to the thigh.

The day before that, I had spent 12 minutes trying various stages of that pose and M3 not really even going for the clasps but working on getting length and rotation with the rope wall. It was great because the notion of progress wasn't on my mind, it just happened, well, it did not just happen but I really was content with the small progress.

Then this morning the philosophy works quote of the day, is “If there are people at once rich and content, be assured that they are content because they know how to be so, not because they are rich.”

Charles Wagner
(1852 – 1918)
French reformed pastor

I like this quote because it gets at the heart of a mistake of the mind that we often make about contentment. We often think it has to do with what we have or don't have, but really it is a skill, something we either know how to do or don't know how to do. The good news about that, of course, is that like any skill, we can acquire it through practice.

MLK day Ahimsa and Health

2012-01-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

I read Letter from Birmingham Jail every year for Martin Luther King day. As you no doubt know, MLK advocated non-violent means for social change. A lot of times in yoga circles, we think of non-violence as the primary ethical teaching of the Sutras, which in a sense it is, but we tend to have a rosy, cheerful view of non-violence,

like yoga should hurt, well, it should hurt in the long run, but sometimes you have to put up with a bit of temporary pain to gain overal liberation from pain. Some of MLK's remarks speak to the Tension or violence in non-violent action.

Just thought I'd share them here.

"Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

Yoga practice is the same sort of cauldron of transformation that enables us to stomp on our own demons of ignorance as a means of to reach those points of liberation within ourselves that King so eloquently alks about.

Backbend Week

2012-01-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is backward bending week again. that reminds me the preferred Iyengar terminology is backward extensions rather than backward bends. We must extend in order to bend.

My main goal for the week teaching wise is to work on shoulderstand (ranging from basic set up to dropping to the floor).

Last week in Castle Hill class, I realized there is not a uniform understanding of setting up for shoulderstand and I was not really teaching shoulderstand that day, so this week I'm teaching shoulderstand. Happily, it goes quite well with backward bending.

The overall sequence of the week will involve the belly down backward extensions, Ustrasana, sirsasana prep, chair dwi pada and Chatushpadasana, sarvangasana. and some M3 work.

Notes from the week. I had a great time teaching the inversion workshop. It was a good reminder in just being open to teaching who shows up. Sam, Jeff, and Nancy came. While I wished there were more people, I really loved the opportunity to show Sam a few tricks about her headstand and help her find a comfortable way to to sarvangasana, Both poses ended up being a lot about the ribs. Nancy is a beginning level student who spends a lot of time taking level 1 classes at the institute, while she is new to headstand, I was really impressed with her sarvangasana.

In Iyengar Land we teach sarvangasana before sirsasana and it was clear she is being taught it on a regular basis in those classes. It is part of what inspired me to make sure I'm teaching it from the ground up to my students.

Also, update on my resolutions. 15 days into the new year and all three resolutions are still in place. I am starting to feel a bit more extension in my twisting. I remain very aware of how much of the difficulty in twisting is tight ribcage and shoulders. I've been doing a lot of supine revolved triangle. Wow, does it ever illustrate the limitations in the ribs that I can kind of bypass when doing the pose standing, also, I found that my mediation cushion is an ideal Ardha M prop, it stays in one place much better than a folded blanket and give good support for the buttocks.

Happy MLK day by the way. MOre on MLK on the PHI 5312 blog later on today.

What I learned from forward bending week

2012-01-12T21:31:00.000-08:00

There's a lot to learn from the concave back stage.

Legs are key.

they are tiring. By Friday, I'm ready to backward bend with gusto.

vira I to vira III to urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana.

MI and Malasana.

thus sayeth the aphoristic philosophizing yogini.

The Song Remains the Same

2012-01-10T18:13:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sitting here getting ready for the first day of class tomorrow. I'm really excited about the Plato Seminar. In fact, thanks to the technology of Word Press and the class blog. I really feel like the class has already started.

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.

Some thoughts on my mind this morning

2012-01-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

1. As I was thinking about what to teach this morning in Focus on Form, several principles about forward bending crystallized in my mine. 1. Keep the groin soft. 2. Keep the legs strong. 3. Get length in the spine. 4. The concave back stage is important. 5. the arms have an important job to do with respect to points 3 and 4.

2. BKS Iyengar's remark that Vira III is a continuation of Vira I and Patricia's observation that Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana is a continuation of vira III. Follow that trajectory all the way through and you get to supta trivikonasana and hanumanasana. One can trace this trajectory even further back to something like ardha pavanmuktasana.

3. I really enjoyed teaching down in San Marcos last night. The class is quite mixed in terms of age range. About half the class is college age or in the first years out of college. The other half is my age or older. What they all seem to have in common is really liking living in San Marcos and that they are really enthusiastic about good yoga in their own town. I was also struck by how many of them do some sort of creative/active work with their hands, music, music theory, art, baking, home brewing and rope wall building. I am always struck by how classes develop their own personality and a lot of the job as a teacher, in my mind, is to facilitate and simply allow that development to occur. Once it does, there's an important sense in which the class teaches itself.

That's often why I'm a bit nervous at the start of the new semester. I don't know the class yet. It's particular dynamic is yet to be formed, yet to come into being, the component parts are there obviously, the texts, me, the students and the perspectives each of these components bring to the table, but exactly how all that will unfold remains to be seen. I'm actually not nervous about the upcoming Plato seminar. I'm mostly excited to dive into the new experience. It has been a year since I've taught a straight philosophy class and the Greeks are my favorite thing to teach.

4. I've been thinking a good bit about the essentiality of soul in the yogic context. What we are upto in yoga is what Patanjali discusses at the opening of the yoga sutra, "When yoga happens, the seer resides in /sees its true nature." Our true nature is perfect. Yoga is about getting rid of all the things that get in the way of our perception of that. Largely, yoga is a practice of perception, learning to see what truly is the case. By and large, I think this is what Plato was upto as well. Plato lived and wrote before there were clear boundaries between modes of human endeavors (what we might call academic disciplines today) but he was clearly interested in what made philosophy different than say, reciting Homeric epics. Philosophy is the practice that enables us to see what is, what truly is the case about ourselves and the world.

Master sequence for the week

2012-01-09T13:43:00.001-08:00

We won't get through all of this in any one of the four classes I'm teaching, but it lists a few basic trajectories through standing and seated forward bends (and a few twists and inversions) that I'll be working from this week.

Enjoy. Hope to see you in class.

Vajrasana

AMVira
AMS
Utt
Malasana Squatting and going foreward
Utt
AMS

Tadasana
UH
UB
Paschima UB
Padahastasana
Padagushtasana
Uttanasana

Ardha Utt
VIII
Urdhva Prasarita Ekapadasana

Dadandasana
Navasana
Ubbaya Padangusthasana
Urdhva Prasarita Padasana 30 60 90

M1
M3
BI

Maha Mudra Prep
JS
Ardha Baddapadmo paschimottanasana

AMS
AMVrk
PM
Sirsasana

Chair Dwi

Chatush
Sarvangasana I and II
Halasana

Maha Mudhra

Savasana

Reflections from Standing Pose week

2012-01-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

This post has four parts, 1. on my new side bar with yoga schedule and teaching yoga, 2. on writing philosophy, 3. on resolutions and practice, 4. a word about the Plato seminar blog.

1. I'm going to start putting my weekly teaching schedule up on the side bar of this blog. So if you want to know where to take yoga with me each week, check here.

I had a busy week teaching last week. I taught two private lessons, the San Marcos School of Yoga started back, I taught at Castle Hill, and I subbed three classes for Devon and did the Friday Practice. My life as a yoga teacher on my last week of vacation from Baylor.

I taught a few trajectories through the standing poses. One took a Gomukasana route, another a Parsva hasta padangustasana route, Standing Pose sequence I worked with most of the week. I posted the San Marcos Sequence last week, here’s the other two trajectories boiled into one sequence.

Tadasana
UH
UB
Gomukasana Arms
Garudasana
Full Gomukasana
AMS
Vrksasana
Utthita Hasta Padangushtasana
Parsva Utthita Hasta Padangushtasana
AMVrk
Sirsasana
Chair Dwi Pada
Sarvangasana
Maha Muhdra prep
Paschimottanasana

I’ve been working a lot with linkages between poses in teaching and it has led to some intriguing insights, for example, a Gomukasana arm and the balance we learn in Vrksasana eventually comes to fruition in Natarajasana. It is almost like the basic standing poses are seed, or bija mantras, that we repeat in various forms and levels of intensity as we progress in practice. We never leave them.

2. On writing Philosophy
I also spent some time working on a comparative paper on Epictetus, a stoic philosopher, and Patanjali, a Samkaya yogic philosopher. I wrote a draft of it in the past two weeks, the writing group has it now. I’ll work more on it this week, and incorporate the writing group suggestions and then we’ll see if it gets accepted at the Rochester conference. It is a good lesson in the perils of procrastination. I really should have given myself more time to get this together, but if it doesn't get into this venue, there are plenty of others. I'm excited about the project as it is another way I'm bringing my yoga and my philosophy lives into harmony.

Here’s the abstract for those who are interested.
Stoically Stilling the Fluctuations of the Mind: A Comparative Exploration of Epictetus and Patanjali.

In this paper, I will place the stoic philosopher Epictetus (55-135 ce)
in conversation with the yogic philosopher, Patanjali (~1-2 century ce). My purpose in doing so is to illuminate a few basic similarities in the philosophic advice that these thinkers offered their students and by extension, their contemporary readers. Despite the very different contexts in which these thinkers lived, both have useful advice about how to live and practice a philosophical life in our stress-filled contemporary world. Drawing upon elements of both these thinkers can help us in our own ongoing quest to know ourselves, our relations with others and our relation with the world most fully. This paper divides into four parts. First, I present some biographical information about the two thinkers and the historical context in which they taught. Second, I explore some resonate similarities in their written work. Third, I draw out salient differences in the overall goals of their philosophical practices. Finally, I consider ways we might incorporate both stoic and yogic practices in our own lives.

3. Resolutions and Practice. One week into the new year and all three of my resolutions are in tact. More twisting, more time with Jeff in the morning, and no using the phone while driving. Now that I am not part of the widespread public health problem of texting while driving it is amazing how often I see how prevalent it is. Jeff and I were almost hit by a cell phone driver who was going straight from a left turn only lane. On the other side of us was a person looking right down at her lap waiting for the light to change. Please stop everyone. I can not believe there is not the same sort of public safety awareness about it as there is for drinking and driving.

I myself feel much less stressed when driving because I am more focus. I am also aware that for me to make this one work for myself, I have to have zero tolerance about it. A cold turkey sort of quitting. Other new habits and resolutions work better for me with an easing in or easing out strategy. .

The twisting is going well also, I'm now at the stage where it feels good in the morning rather than the oh I really don't want to do that stage. Having the rope wall helps a lot. It adds a whole range of ways to do parivritta poses and standing marichyasana with the rope wall is great. Overall, the rope wall gives me tons more leverage in all the twists.

I was reminded of the idea of practice as a labratory, where we test and experiment with what we learn this weekend. I went to a lovely inversion class this weekend with Sharon Conroe who was in town to do a workshop with Peggy. She taught a sequence that Abijata taught in Pune this december, with frequent advice from BKS about where he really wanted the student attention. In a nutshell, it's all about the feet and the hands. Sharon said that, of course we trust our teachers and do what they say in practice, but it really isn't until we've verified what works for us in our own practice that we know it.

4. I'm excited about teaching the Plato seminar. Last I checked I have 8 students which in my mind is in the ideal range of 7-14 for a grad seminar. I'm experimenting with a class collaborative blog which you can check out at http://blogs.baylor.edu/phi531201s12/

We'll be doing a few dialogues that I worked with in A Philosophic Muse, but much of the course is geared toward helping me chart out the trajectory of part two of my narrative work, Socratic Epics.

That's it for now. I need to leave to teach.

some thoughts on equality and ability

2012-01-02T20:02:00.000-08:00

I had a good friend a long time ago who was in the process of converting to Christian Science. She was a life long Catholic and had been attending the same church that I was attending in Waco, for Waco, particularly it was a very liberal church and one day she remarked, "I just don't know what Jimmie (the preacher) really believes sometimes." For her, it was a troubling thing, for me not at all, she wanted some sort of structure, some sort of standard to set her beliefs by and that was just not important to me, in general, never has been.

I was thinking about that recently with respect to Light on Yoga and "classic form." What really is the point of knowing what the pose is in and of itself? We live in an anything goes world and even more so anything goes in the yoga world and in this I find myself more on my good friend's side of the question. I find that classic form gives me something to believe.

Of course, classic form is defined by someone who already can do all the poses, so we are looking at a trikonasana of someone who can to hanumanasana, a janu sirsasana of someone who can do eka pada sirsasana. Someone who had been practicing hard, and even harder still after the book came out 46 years ago. BKS himself is famous for saying Light on yoga is a dead book. Differently put, it is dead if you don't practice what is in it yourself.

BKS is also famous for props and numerous variations, let's say countless, if not in principle infinite variations on classic form, but he still has classic form in mind. So take a common issue in Austin. Pincha Mayurasana with palms up, not the classic pose or thinking sirsasana is some form of Pincha where your head really doesn't touch the ground. What bothers me about students of yoga not knowing classic form is that it generates a confused mind state. It isn't that we always do it by the book, but it is good to know what the book says...

but again why? I am personally "just" interested... but how to make someone interested or what if you aren't interested and you just want to move and do what feels natural to you... I think the book, in this case LOY, like religious books, give standards to strive for, a pattern that can guide our own practice.

Another way the issue came up was on Christinasell.blogspot.com lately. She was talking about the four pillars of backward bending and some comments were around, well what if you can't do that advanced stuff.... it is sort of an elitist thing.. there are all sorts of this in LOY that I look at and go.. well, I"m not there yet, but I don't feel excluded from the vision because the path of how to realize the vision is relatively straightforward. Long, uninterrupted, intense practice done with devotion and intelligence.

The exchange on Christina's blog reminded me of another conversation I had with my old friend? One day, one the eve of her conversion she was asking why I thought different people had different gifts and abilities if god loves us all equally? It was one of those abstract sort of conversations were the referent is not explicitly state, but Jimmie had in fact just preached a sermon on the matter and so I said, "well I guess it depends if we are all equally blessed?" It was a great moment with my friend because she felt understood and even though we were clearly going different ways on the spiritual path, we shared this common meeting ground.

We live in a world that values the notion of equality. It does not infact value equality but it values the notion of it. I think the yogic system ultimately is a system that strives for freedom and equality, where we all get on the path ultimately is the same, but where we are actually are on the path is very very different and not at all the same.

San Marcos Sequence Week I

2012-01-02T19:05:00.000-08:00

Things started back up at San Marcos School of yoga tonight, the last even there before it transforms into School of Yoga, San Marcos at 9:00 AM tomorrow morning.

Sukasana,
Tadasana,
working with brick between ankles knees and thighs,
UH
UB
UN
Vrksasana worked with using belt to help knee pain.
Utthita Hasta Padasana
Parsva Utthita HP
Trikonasa
Vira II
(Back at wall for all of these).

Parsvotanasana concave back hands on block heel at wall
Adho Muka Svanasana, palms at wall and heels at wall.
Supta I and II outer hip supported by block
Setu Bandha
Savasana doing Ujjayi I.

Short and sweet.

Castle Hill Class tomorrow. Junior I standing poses.

in other breaking news, Jeff has the rope wall up. It is exciting beyond measure.

Resolutions

2012-01-02T06:38:00.000-08:00

Jeff and I went out to dinner New Year's Eve with his good friend Eric. We went to Cafe Malta and the food was again, amazing. It was also quiet enough to have a conversation and it being the new year and all, resolutions came up. I do tend to make new year's resolutions. Some are pose related, some are life related. Eric isn't a resolution sort of person in the sense that he needs the new year to make a change. I agree with that, but I do like the whole freshness of the new year as a symbol of making a fresh start at something.

Eric asked me if resolutions tend to stick. Some do, like being a vegetarian, some I don't quite get, I still can't do Mariychasana III without help, but I'm getting a lot closer.

This year I resolved three main things.

1. Not to use mobile device while driving. This one I actually started about 3 days before the new year.

2, Spend a few minutes sitting with my husband every morning before rushing off in my flurry of activity, this one I also started early.

3. Spend twelve minutes a day twisting. This is in addition to whatever other practice I have going on. I'm turning on the timer in the morning after pranayama and meditation and twisting.

I mentioned the twelve minutes of twisting at group practice on Wednesday and Meredith said I should chart my progress.

so for those who are interested, I worked on twists in sukasana, dandasana, bharadvajasana I and II, MI, M3 with leg in baddha konasana so it remained an open twist, a bit of ardha masteyndrasana ii, twists in upavistha konasana and parivrritta upavistha. This is pretty much what I did day one and two. I worked a lot with a strap to pull my arm around the back of my body. I sort of make a pulley with the belt and my foot and lever the arm around.

One thing I've discovered already is that the limitations in my shoulder are holding me back, just small pieces like bottom gomukasana arm come up all the time in twists.

Teaching Schedule for the week

2012-01-02T06:25:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone, I'm teaching a lot of yoga this week. It is standing pose week.

Monday San marcos school of yoga at 5:30
Tuesday Castle Hill 9:30 AM-10:55 Level II III
Wednesday Clear Spring Studio 5:30 PM-7:30 PM Hard Work.
Thursday Clear Spring Studio 4:15-5:45 Restorative
Thursday Clear Spring Studio 6:00-7:30 Level 1, ii
Friday Clear Spring Studio 4:30 appreviated group practice.

Thursday morning

2011-12-29T13:05:00.000-08:00

The last couple days have been filled with yoga teaching. I'm enjoying teaching at Castle Hill. It has been part of my yoga experience ever since I moved here in 2007. I started going there because it was close to the house I was renting part of at the time and it used to be the only place in town that had anything going on yogawise Friday afternoons. I started going to Happy Hour and a half with Giaconda. In my own life, that's morphed into friday practices with Devon and our decision sometime in 2009, to start Friday advanced practices.

In 2008, I went to Feathered Pipe and met Heide Grace who had just moved to austin and started teaching Iyengar at the Castle, I was on sabbatical at that time and took her classes and also practiced with her two or three times a week, it was a great year of practice, then Heide moved back to New Orleans, but knowing her has led to some great Iyengar experiences with Patricia at the Abbey and Gabriella at the Ranch.

I was reminded about the ebb and flow of people coming together to do yoga last night when I subbed Wednesday Group Practice at the Castle. Christina started that practice a couple years ago and Sam took it over and I subbed it pretty regularly. it was a small group, Shannon, Debbie, Meredith, Carole, Lindsey from Lulu and Jason showed up. It was a very peaceful approach to dropbacks and it did feel like an end of one era and the beginning of another. I teach there now and Sam will be teaching a 3/4 class wednesday instead.

Things change, practice remains.

A few thoughts about life and death

2011-12-29T06:04:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jeff and I went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Houston Fine Arts Museum over the holiday weekend. Most of the artifacts there are oriented around the afterlife, procuring eternal life for one's self through a set of elaborate practices that would help you navigate the dangerous terrain of the "underworld." I'm not really sure what the Egyptians called the place they went to afterwards, but it is clear that they saw it as a rather pernicious dangerous place where many evils might befall one. Clearly, they believed in a sort of bodily resurrection (ie mummification) and canoptic jars that held the four central organs of the body, the liver being once of them. In fact, one god had the specific job of guardian the liver of the departed. One could not be reconstitued without these organs. Whenever I see some exhibit like that one, I am struck by how much I don't know about the various ways people comport themselves with respect to the big questions, and also struck by the fact, that this religion, strange though it seems lasted for thousands of years, longer in fact that Christianity has been practiced. on some level, it must have "worked" ie. filled the spiritual need of the people, or at least some of the people.

We also took a brief look at some of the Indian Art. What a difference, the gods are presented as engaged in all sorts of actions, that bridge the gap between life and death, like the dancing shiva, dancing the dance of creation and destruction, Saraswati gaining and imparting knowledge, Vajrasana sitting, by the way in padmasana, not vajrasana. The depiction of the gods and goddess was much more joyful and fluid.

I'm more knowledgeable about Greek and Christian depictions of the Gods and the afterlife, the Greeks viewed the afterlife as a rather somber experience. The Gods did all the things that humans did. The Christian understanding of the afterlife varies from depictions of the circles of hell, to radiant angels. Obviously, I'm being overly simplistic here, but my point is that the notion that something transcends our experience in the here and now does, at least, on a minimal level, seem rather universal.

One of my favorite Nietzsche quotes on this topic, "Over two thousand years and still no new gods."

A former student of mine, Randy Spencer shared this link to an Article in the Atlantic "Is God an Accident?"

The week between

2011-12-27T04:30:00.000-08:00

It is always a strange sort of time between Christmas and New Years, not a normal regime, between semesters, between years. A sort of liminal space. Things are sometimes more festive, sometimes more relaxed, sometimes more stressful. This year is more on the festive side of things for me.

The festivities started Christmas Eve Eve with the Nutcracker and dinner with Christina, Kelly, and Mom and Dad, and the furry members of the family. Then, Jeff and I just spent the past couple days in Houston with his family for the holidays. We stayed a great hotel, Hotel Zaza, because it is close to both his brother's house and his parents' house. His family are lots of fun but not really "dog friendly" people so we chose to stay at a very dog friendly hotel.

We left in the rain on Christmas Eve, the drive was about the most stressful part of the holiday. We got to the hotel and hung out for a while. They we went to his parents' house and had a fabulous dinner (Fettucine Alfredo and grilled veggies) and opened presents with his niece and nephew on Christmas Eve, (complete with a visit from Santa) it was a really pretty idyllic scene, gorgeous tree, gorgeous house, more presents than seemed possible.. They we went back to the hotel. Christmas morning we went to Christmas brunch at his brother's house and saw even more presents that Santa brought. Back to the hotel, then we had Christmas dinner with his parents, another great meal, though less veggie friendly, still plenty to eat. Jeff's mom is an amazing cook. Monday, we all went to the King Tut exhibit together and then had leftovers and headed back home. We rested for a bit then went over to Mom and Dad's to visit with them and their best friends, Marie and Bob, who came for Christmas all the way from Lavonia.

It was really great doing my meditation and pranayama practice this morning. I didn't really do much on the mat practice the past two days and it was just lovely being back in my own practice space. As luck would have it, this is pranayama week in public classes. So I'm going to work with this sequence both Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

Vajrasana
AMVira with blocks
AMS
AMvrk
PM
Sirsasana
Chair dwi pada
Chathush,
Dropping over from sarvangasana
Maha Mudhra
Savasana

I'll also work with some of the supine poses
Supta BK
Supta SK
Supta Vira

Tuesday I'm subbing for Gillian and plan to do a bit of rope work.

Wednesday I'm subbing group Practice at the castle and plan to do the dwi pada drop over sequence we did last Friday practice.

Then this friday there's practice at Clear Spring, we'll probably twist in that Devon is teaching 12 backbends for 2012 on new years day.

A thorough depressing post about women in philosophy

2011-12-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

My friend Chris Long recently posted this link to his facebook page. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html

It lists the top fifty PhD programs according to the number of females the have tenured or on tenure track. Penn State, my alma mater, ranks a very respectable 4th with 41 percent female. First is University of Georgia with a solid 50%.

Baylor, on the list is tied with three other schools at the bottom with 0%.. 0/13. We are actually 1/14 which makes me wonder about my own existence, or at least it would, if I were the philosophical sort, oh but wait, I am the philosophical sort.

Actually, we are 7% female, apparently, I am the 7%, not the 99%. That jumps us up to a tie for next to last with Texas and Southern Illinois (whose female faculty member, coincidentally went to grad school with me at Penn State.

It is just a very depressing situation. I could say more, but to me what is most depressing overall, about it, is that it is not a situation that will change in my lifetime, in fact, not in generations.

The BIC is better on the females, there are it is 3 of 8, a quite respectable 37.5 percent. if you counted me in that list it would be 4 of 9, or 44 percent, maybe that's what happened I didn't count in philosophy because I am director of BIC, but I'm clearly listed on the philosophy web page and my budget and voting classification is in Philosophy, even though i direct this other program.

Here's a good post that gives an account of why things might be the way they are.

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1881

HEre's a post that offers ten things you can do to change the situation.http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/ten-small-things-you-can-do-to-promote-gender-equity-in-philosophy/

Wednesday - Writing

2011-12-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

Well, there's a bit of a break in the action of the week. I've been driving to Waco to do phone and a couple in person interviews for an open position we have in the BIC, so that has cut into my feeling of being on break, but today there are no interviews and three left tomorrow. I'm a bit tired and it is nice to spend a chunk of the day at home and not on the road.

We kind of scheduled the day around getting the house cleaned (people did not show up again) and getting my first oil change in the Honda, (which did occur). I've been putting my Socratic Irony paper into the proper format for inclusion in the Southwestern Philosophy Review. The paper itself is now formatted, but I still need to do the list of references, but as I said there's a break in the action and I need to find a reliable housecleaning service.

This morning, I subbed at the Castle for Kim. A bit of a smaller class, we had a great time working on chair back bends and inversions. One student, who does vinyasa came and left after five minutes, I decided not to take it personally. I think all the instruction was a bit daunting and the asking about injury... if you aren't used to it, it can be a little invasive.... It would have been a great class for her to take, but you can't win over everyone all of the time.

Here's the sequence, short and sweet.

Vajrasana (blanket between calves and thighs)
AMS
Uttanasana
Tadasana
UH
Gomukasana arms only really working on the tricep rotation
Paschima namascarasana
AMS
AMVrk worked with three different belt positions, on wrist, on elbows and at arm pits. (thanks to Paula for showing me the wrist and arm pit last Friday). It was really fascinating to watch which strapping worked with which set of arms the best.
PM (with belt and two blocks), then holding sides of block, then turning palms up, we took a brief look at LOY at this point to see the PM and the shyanasana pose.
Sirsasana
Chair Dwi Pada I, feet on floor and then blocks, various arm positions then stretched arms out, did twice,
Chair Dwi Pada going toward getting head on the flour with arms in sirsasana,... we looked at LOY here and I have to say Angela and Logan looked pretty BKS like in the shape of their poses.

AMVrk (ala George Purvis) one handstand and all backbends are forgotten
viparita karani
savansana (working with Ujjayi 1).

Fun times.

I'm trying to work with at least one pranyama each class and I'm also trying to look at light on yoga at least in class. That and my ongoing work on linking poses.

Next week I'm teaching four times at the castle, more backbends, inversions and pranayama.

Backbends and how we learn to know what we know

2011-12-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

So I'm having a great time teaching at Castle Hill, it is really a great pedagogical opportunity to take over a class of capable students who are interested in yoga. Many thanks to Mandy for all the great work she did with the class. It is rare that one gets to take over a yoga class like this. usually, new classes are a build from ground zero sort of experience.

It is a perfect scenario for teaching poses on the Junior I syllabus in that they are out of reach to most beginners.

There's a bit of a challenge in that by and large the students are Anusara students and though I'm conversant in Anusuara, it is not the language in which I teach so there are some translation issues going on.

Today two really great and related questions came up.

Cecilia asked the first one. I was talking about keeping the inner groin soft as well "compact the hips." Swati's main teaching of that, at least my take on it, is that the softness of the inner groin is primary, whatever "hard work" there is is more in the outer leg than the inner and cannot come at the expense of soft inner groin.

Cecilia asked "what if we really can't do that?" Good question. I've asked the same question myself many times. I like Ramanand Patel's answer the best. "Do the opposite" and then release, whatever you feel in the release is the beginning of right action.

Shannon asked a similar version of the question. How do we tell if we are doing something wrong without the teacher there to tell us?" Then, we had a delightful exploration of "what goes wrong in a pose." and don't you know what goes wrong, so knowing what you know, proactively fix it.

Here's the sequence we worked with

Vajrasana
UH in tadasana
UB in tadasana
Paschima UB in tadasana
AMS
Utt concave
Utt
Eka pada supta virasana – other leg in Marichyasana (twice)
AMS
Supta virasana
AMS
Eka pada Bhekasana twice

Bhekasana full pose bolster and show partner work.
Paryankasana with strap and block going toward full pose
AMS

AMS
Sirsasana

Sarvangasana dropping over to chair
M3
Ujjayi 2
Savasana

On the reality of form

2011-12-18T10:41:00.000-08:00

A couple of posts ago I was talking about whether asanas could be regarded as Platonic forms or social conventions. Mark Franke posted this quote from Geeta Iyengar on Facebook a couple days ago which has some relevance to the discussion. Geeta writes,

"Asanas are not created out of the blue. They came into existence as a methodical approach to living and therefore, they are classified systematically. The seemingly physical asanas have a great potential to change the behavioral patterns of the practitioner, which in turn changes the mental stature, enabling the practitioner to proceed further and remain on the spiritual path. This systematic classification is based on the anatomical structure and function of the body and a sequential progression of movement . It brings a progressive activation of the internal body so that one penetrates through the outer body to the inner one, and again, through the body and the mind to excavate the hidden energy of one's very existence, to reach the source of being, the Soul." ~ Geeta Iyengar

I went out with Meg Brooker, who is a professional Duncan Dancer see her tunicsintexas.blogspot.com and she also studies the noyes rhythm technique http://www.noyesrhythm.org/ we were having a similar conversation. Meg also studied Iyengar yoga during her time in New York and has been part of the Anusara community here as well and is a pretty regular attendee of group practice. Meg also has graduate degree in Performance studies and so though we come to yoga from slightly different backgrounds, philosophy versus dance, there's a lot of overlap in our interests. I was telling her a bit about the conversation of too much variation and a thing becomes something else.

I mentioned that Iyengar often distinguishes yoga from dance because of what he sees of as the different aims, ie samadhi, to see the soul and aesthetic expression.

We also had just practiced a Patricia backbend sequence that was about created a harmonious curve in the spine and Meg remarked that is precisely what Duncan was after and also remarked that the Noyse method was very influenced by Greek understandings of Harmony and the idea was if one put the body through a series of harmonious movements, the soul would become harmonious as well. Very Pythagorean all in all.

Anyway, she then said that Duncan had the idea that the ultimate point of dance was for the body to become invisible and the soul to become luminous. If that is the goal, it sounds a great deal like, the seer dwelling in its own true splendor.

It reminded me Swati's discussion of the Gita's claim that "yoga is skillful action." She went onto say that "anything done skillfully is yoga."

So some food for thought.

The restorative workshop was lovely. Here's the sequence for those interested.

Neck and shoulder savasana with roll underneck, weights on shoulders and arms and legs up in chair. Supta BK, Supta Sukasana, Supta Virasana, AMS with head support and legs supported by wall ropes, rope sirsasana, rope halasana, viparita karani, setubanda with legs out wide supported up on bolster, savasana. Delightful.

Looking foward to teaching backbends this week at Castle Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Plato and Patanjali on Death and Dying

2011-12-15T06:20:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was teaching one of my private students, Dorothy. Cue was away Elk hunting. She was in Viparita Karani and I had put a bunch of weights on her hands shoulders and feet and she remarks, "This is the way I'd like to go out." I kind of laughed, but I thought you know, she's getting something pretty profound about the practice. Patanjali's yoga sutras list the five afflictions that give rise to the various vrittis that impede our ability to still the fluctuations of the mind and hence see our true nature.

The five kleshas are avidya, ignorance, asmita, ego, raga or pleasure, devsha or aversion to pain, and abhinivesha, fear of death or clinging to life. Patanjali regards, avidya as the root or breeding ground of all the other kleshas but he goes onto note that abhinivesha is the hardest to eradicate and it is present even in the wisest of people. I thought in some sense Dorothy was experiencing the loosening of that last klesha, there was some state in which she could face the prospect of death with equanimity.

Dorothy is my parents' age and so I told them this story a few days later and we kind of laughed about it, particularly the idea about me having put weights on someone and that's why they couldn't get up if they needed to in the face of death.

The next week Dorothy just referred to Viparita karani as the RIP pose. So be it.

Anyway, it reminded me of the story told about how BKS iyengar's wife faced her death, wide awake with equanity, just watching her last breathe leave. I don't remember where I read this account but it is a rather common account of how the yogi or the yogini passes over.

Also, it reminded me of Socrates' remarks in the Phaedo, the dialogue that recounts his death. There he tells his followers not to lament his passing because what is essentially him remains. The body is like a worn piece of clothing. The description is remarkably similar to the descriptions of the soul and the body in the Gita.

He goes onto say that true philosophy is in fact, a preparation for death and dying. that the philosopher, in so far as is possible, detaches from things like raga and devsha, so that the soul has more experience of its true state while living and hence is more prepared for death.

So on that cheerful note, Happy Thursday to all.

Sequences for the week

2011-12-15T05:46:00.000-08:00

Well, I've got a couple posts in mind and I also need to post sequences.

Here are the sequences from this week.

Monday Evening Week Six San Marcos.

Tadasana,
Urdhva Hastasana
UH walking hands up the wall
Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana
Parsva utthita Hasta Padangustasana
Prasarita Padottanasana
Sirsasana
Uttansana
Adho Muka Vrksasana
AMS
Dandasana back against the wall
BK
UVK
Dandasana
Janusirsasana
Back to the wall
Paschimottasana feet to wall, walk hands up the wall,
Chatush padasana
Viparita Karani
Savasana

Chloe asked which poses to do every day. I told her Adho Mukhasvanasa, supta I and II, sirsasana and sarvangasana.

Castle hill Forward Bends Homework. Do Ujjayi 1 every day.

Tadasana,
Urdhva Hastasana
UB
Paschima Namascarasana
UN
Ukatasana
Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana
Parsva utthita Hasta Padangustasana foot on bar and independent in room
Prasarita Padottanasana II
Sirsasana away from wall and sirsasana prep with two blocks and three blocks.
Uttansana
AMS work on arm angle/ getting armpit open (use blocks and chairs)
AMS
Dandasana
Janusirsasana
Ardha Baddha Padma paschimottansana, concave back, holding foot with both hands.
Paschimottasana concave back walking hands up wall (holding onto bar, then fold forward
Chatush padasana
Sarvagasana
Sarvangasana II
Ujjayi I
Savasana

What's on the docket for Friday? dropping over from Dwi Pada

These are some notes Randy sent me from the recent Patricia Workshop in Santa Fe. Devon will lead us through it Friday.

Saturday, November 12, 2011
Morning session 10:00a-1:00pm

SUTRAS 2:46, 2:47, 2:42, 2:48
Harmonious curve of the spine
AmVirasana
Adho Mukha Svanasana
Uttanasana - concave
Uttanasana
Eka pada supta virasana – keep knee on the mid-line
Supta Virasana
Paryankasana trunk, supta tadasasana legs, belt hammock-sling on arms for head to rest on
Supta Virasana
Paryankasana – draw arms into the sockets
Ardha supta virasana – other leg in maricyasansa
Lunge on front leg, back leg in Bhekasana, before bending keep the foot at the outer thigh, do not let them come apart, do not turn torso
Eka pada Bhekasana
Bhujangasana with calves belted – coil top chest, use the arms with elbows bent
Salabhasana – alternate pose for those not doing full Bhekasana
Bhekasana full pose
Samasthiti – as prep for Sirsasana
Sirsasana – prep with block (savasana block then Tadasana block) legs in pinchamayurasana, sirsasana with fingers interlaced around block.
eka pada
parivrttaikapada
Adho Mukha Vrksasana
Urdvha Hastasana – face the wall to roll the deltoids out and move the upper arm bones away from the wall
Amdho Mukha Vrksasana
Pinchamayurasana _at the wall and balance

Room divided into 2 groups
Beginner group:
Chair dpvd
Ustrasana – front thighs @ chair
Chair dpvd deeper off chair
Ustrasana

Advanced Group:
Chatush padasana – holding edge of mat
Urdhva dhanurasana
There was a group dropping over onto a chair
Advanced Group:
Sirsasana drop backs to wall
Legs bent, then straighten
Chatush Padasana, lift thoracic, shins back, lift hips
Urdhva Dhanurasana – belt around the femur heads
DPVD – feet @ the wall

Sirsasana drop-back middle of room, if thumping down then go to a chair, do not let the head lift at all when dropping over. Move the thorasic spine forward
To cool down:
Adho Mukha Svanasana – Prasarita Padottanasana, – Parsvottanasana (do not stay in poses)
Savasana

And Saturday a lovely restorative sequence. Clear Spring 3-5 cost $40

Protagoras, Yoga, Philosophy, and that which is

2011-12-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Protagoras was a famous sophists who roamed about Greece from 490 when he was born to his death in 420. He was really quite the "rock star" of his day. He was a great speaker, had a massive student following, and in many ways set the tone of the intellectual conversation around and about Athens in the 440s and 430s.

Most people associate him with the saying, "man is the measure of all things." But the other part of the quote is more what's on my mind lately. "Humans are the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not." Plato on the other hand, says, not so. There are things that are and we as humans don't make them that way. How we perceive them is another matter, but Protagoras is making some pretty fundamental claims about the social construction of reality itself and he is explicitly taking on prior philosophical traditions, like Parmenides and those before him with the "Things that are" language. It is sort of a code. like "the ten thousand things" in the Dao de Ching. It really means everything. It is just a poetical way of saying it. Anyway, more on that later.

As many of you know, I've starting thinking about this project on evangelical Christian views of yoga and so I had it in mind to ask Swati her views about whether yoga is a religion or not. Or in Protagoras' terms, is it a religion if someone says it is a religion or is something about it intrinsically religious. I never got around to asking the question because a lot of what she said indirectly answered the question for me or at least got me thinking about it in a different way. The short answer to the question is that the question arises from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of yoga. To ask the question reveals a tendency to distinguish activities that really aren't distinguishable in the "real yoga" context.

She started class last Friday with a discussion about how much we can vary a thing before it becomes something else. She had Tatiana do Adho Mukasvanasana, and then had her walk her feet in, at some point, the pose stops being AMS and becomes Uttansana, (interrelationality of forms here) similarly walk too far back and it becomes plank pose. Now, you do have to know what AMS is and what the other are poses, in order to get the point. Someone with no background in yoga would just see some kind of continuum and not be able to say "now it is X." because they don't know the discrete units that make up the poses. So there is a kind of human participation involved Protagoras seems right. He also seems right in that we all more or else agreed, to call that particular pose in LOY AMS. so you could say it is all still a matter of human agreement.

But is interesting to think about the poses existing as a form of justice might exist. let's say the pose "really exists" at least functionally as a form. We are endeavoring to approximate an ideal form. Later, in the workshop swati also pointed out that we are approximating a standing pose like Vira I from the perspective of someone who can do hanumanasana and similarly janusirsasana from someone who can do eka pada sirsasana.

She used another example of her uncle making an Indian food dish. He has lived in the US many many many years, and he made a special family dish for her, but he substituted so many things and it had been so long since he had "the real thing." and to her taste, it was no longer the same dish.

So too, I think she would regard a lot of "what we call yoga" in the west, not the same dish, too much of the context is lost, too much variability of the forms of practice have been added. So even to ask whether yoga is a religion or not is to ask it from the perspective that is other, western, not Indian.

Sequences from the Castle

2011-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night group practice turned out a bit different from what I planned. It must have been the 666* code they provided to the room. Everyone was laughing about it and so the class ended up being more hip openers from hell rather than arms balances and twists. You can see the original sequence from wednesday

Adho Mukha Virasana and Parsva Variations with legs in three different positions, toes together, knees wide, in vajrasana and in virasana. AMS between each position

AMS-

Uttanasana-

Malasana -

Uttanasana

AMS

Supta Padangusthasana 1-V - (show supported variations.

Eka pada supta virasana-

Supta II with one leg in BK.

AMS

Eka Hasta Bhujasana

Asthavakrasana

Vashitsasana

Adho Mukha Vrksasana
Pinca Mayurasana-
Sirsasana and variations-5
Uttanasana

Chatush, parsva Chatush
Sarvangansa
halasana
Parsva Halasana

VK or savasana.

Then this morning I subbed for Liz. Similar to what I taught tuesday, but more emphasis on the shoulders. It is really fun having my own class at the castle and developing a new student base.

Vajrasana
Tadasana block between thighs, palms out
UH
UH with strap on elbows
Paschima shoulder work holding onto strap with hands.
AMS
Gomukasana arms only, working each individual part Up arm and then down arm.
Paschima Namascarasana
AMS
Gomukasana full pose first just legs, then arms and legs
AMS
lolasana with blocks, strap legs together second time around.
AMS
Sirsasana working on balancing two inches from wall,
Supta BK
Supta Sukasana
Viparita Karani
Savasana

The Book of Kimmel

2011-12-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a truly great day. My very first philosophy professor, Larry Kimmel, had his retirement reception down at Trinity. Jeff and I drove down for it. It was so inspiring. Larry has taught at Trinity for 45 years. There's a great article about him in the student paper, the Trinitonian,

There were some other former students from my era there and I also got to see two of my other favorite professors, Willis Solomon and Victoria Aarons. They along with Larry and Chuck Salman are really the reasons I am an academic philosopher today.

I realized I have been in Baylor culture a really long time because it never even occurred to me that they would serve wine at an on campus event, but lo and behold, they did along with excellent appetizers. After a bit of mingling about, Steve Luper, current chair of the department (and Baylor philosophy grad by the way) started the events. He read several student accounts from rate my professor about Larry. Students love him. It is really inspiring to see that great teachers connect with students over such an extended period of time. I was struck by how my four years there, which seem so formative in my mind, were not even a tenth of the years that Larry spent inside the philosophy classroom. I was also struck by the fact that I've been at this 18 years now and still not even half as long as Larry has been teaching philosophy.

It really is a way of life and ideally a way of a good long life.

I showed Jeff the room where I first took philosophy (ethics, then existentialism) and the room right next door where I took logic. Then we wandered upstarts and we went in Chapman auditorium which is where I took Human Quest. I reflected on how the seeds for my BIC involvement were planted in that very room. Human Quest was an interdisciplinary humanities program that all freshman honors students took. It was team taught and over the course of the year went from ancient Greece to Freud and the Vienna circle. Another neat thing about the course is that the writing class freshman year was linked to it. We wrote our English papers on the very same books that we read in Quest. That's were I met Willis.

Willis gave a wonderful tribute to Larry last night, as did the current Provost and former dean of Students Dean Grissom. It was so wonderful to sit near my former teachers again and list to them spin their magical enchantments. Eloquence abounded.

I didn't do yoga way back then and now yoga and philosophy are so intertwined for me but I found myself really enjoying the memories of just the philosophy side of things.

The department also asked former students to contribute to a Book of Kimmel and here's my contribution.

The Book of Kimmel

Not long ago, I wrote an essay about falling in love with philosophy. My love affair with philosophy began in Larry Kimmel’s Ethics class. I was not sure I liked philosophy right away, but somehow I knew I was in the right place. I liked the questions that Larry asked even though I could never quite answer them. It took another class or two for philosophy to hook me forever. Larry Kimmel’s Existentialism class did the trick. It wasn’t so much the existentialism that got me. It was something he said about it. He wasn’t sure if existentialism was a livable project. I don’t know why that phrase struck me but it did. It has stuck with me as well. Is existentialism a livable project? The heck with that question. Is life a livable project? And what kind of philosophy will help me live it? Over the years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that these are THE questions, the right questions, the most difficult and most critical questions to ask and answer.

I’ve pretty much spent my life asking these questions and getting students to ask these questions, well, twenty years, and if Larry’s dedication to the task of teaching philosophy is any indication, I’ve got quite a few years of philosophy ahead of me.

Truthfully, Larry is never far from my mind. His words and pedagogical spirit are firmly embedded in my soul. Larry started me on the philosophical path, but beyond that I always appreciated that he cared about me as a person, about my life outside the philosophy classroom.

I’ve had the good fortune to remain in touch with Larry over the years, trips to San Antonio, philosophy conferences and the like. His kind, generous spirit of personal and philosophical engagement always nourishes me.

Larry, I hope you find as much enjoyment in your retirement as you have throughout your career. I wish you the very best for it is certainly what you have given me.

Much love,

Annie

It's Wednesday Morning

2011-12-07T06:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a really fun day. I love the Focus on Form Class. I had a nice chat with Gillian in the snack bar afterwards. Read a dissertation, did a few things around the house, met with Alex Noll, a high school senior possibly interested in Baylor, Jeff and I got upside down, fixed garlic quinoa pasta for dinner and went to the Messiah with Mom and Dad. Great day all in all despite the fact that I did not get any of my own writing done.

I'm getting ready to spend the day up in Waco. My schedule is a bit different these two interim weeks. I have a bunch of meetings today and then again next Wednesday. It is a bit of a shift from the TR consciousness, but good training for next semester when Wednesdays will be up in Waco days again.

My main writing goal for the interim time is to get all the remaining edits on my book finished. I have some minor writing goals as well which include finishing the suggested edits on the Philosopher Queens paper, deciding whether a paper on Epictetus and Patanjali is worth writing and writing it if it is.

Reading goals Zuckerts Plato's Philosophers, writing a draft of a pedagogy article about the yoga capstone course.

yoga goals, twist and backbend a lot. M3 is definitely in sight.

I also have to finish writing the Plato syllabus for next semester and make my writing schedule for the interim and for the semester.

Doesn't sound like much of a vacation, but there's just something intrinsically vacation-like about the between semester time.

well off to phase five of morning preparations. Breakfast, then walk dog, shower and get on the road.

Castle Hill Sequences

2011-12-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

Here's what we did at the Castle on Tuesday morning.

Vajrasana blanket between calves and thighs
tadasana
UH
AMS partner work.
Gomukasana arms only,
AMS
Gomuasana full pose
paschimanamascarasana
prasarita paddottasana I and II
AMS
AMVrk

sirsasana working with tri/quad folded blanket.

sarvangasana I and II
ujjayi, 2
savasana

Your homework. buy a strap and use it in AMS and AMvrk

Main themes, throat soft, collarbones broad, shoulder blades on back correct turn of the triceps and we worked a bit with ribs back.

Tonight, I'm leading group practice. I plan to do a modified Thanksgiving sequence.

Adho Mukha Virasana and Parsva Variations

AMS-

Uttanasana-

Malasana -

Uttanasana

AMS

Supta Padangusthasana 1-V - (show supported variations.

Eka pada supta virasana-

AMS

UKtanasana
Garudasana
Gomukasana arms only and full poses
AMS
Eika pada ama
Urdhva Prasarita eka padasana

Adho Mukha Vrksasana
Pinca Mayurasana-
Sirsasana and variations-5
Uttanasana

Prasarita paddotanasana 1 and II

Parsvakonasana

Pasasana

Parivritta parsvakonasana

Marichyasana 1

Eka hasta bhujasana

Astavakrasana

AMS

Chair dwi pada

Chair twists,

Chair sarvangasana

M3

not sure what I'll do yet for Liz's class

watching people come and go, shades of Michaelangelo

2011-12-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

actually, the line from the love song of j. alfred prufrock is

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The room in question is a cheap hotel.

I think my remembered version is actually better, but it reminded me of one of Swati's main teachings of the weekend. That where we want to get is to the state where we attain "witness" consciousness. just watching ourselves do our various activities as if we were watching a play, we are engaged in the action, but not with the ups and downs of circumstances as if we were the actors.

Anyway, I started that post yesterday.. Now it is today... yesterday I got caught in the circumstance of stressful dealing with technology and lost my bearings a bit in the morning, but then remembered the lesson and got my mind back on track.

So today, I awoke with a different mindset that I would attune myself differently.

For the first week of no classes, I've scheduled a busy week for myself. Looking at Anne come and go, talking of yoga and philosophy and perhaps some Michaelangelo.

San Marcos sequence Week Five

2011-12-05T20:26:00.001-08:00

Here's what we did tonight.

Worked with inhalations to warm ourselves during sitting.
Supported AMvira, bolster and hands up on blocks,
AMS
AMS supported with head on bolster.
tadasana
UH
pashcima shoulder stretch with strap
trikonasana, palm flat on block,
prasarita paddottasana
sirsasana working with tri/quad folded blanket.
chatush
parvas chatush.
setu banda, on bolster legs, wide on blocks, then in bk, the straight.
ujjayi, 3
supported savasana

fun times, worked with keeping the groin and the throat soft.

Homework, behind the back shoulder work with strap.

Busy Week

2011-11-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

It feels like it should be Friday, but its wednesday afternoon. It's been a hectic week, adding the new class at Castle Hill, teaching in San Marcos, long day at Baylor filled with end of the semester activity. Then the kitchen sink sprung a leak Monday evening right after Mom and Dad came over for dinner so Jeff spent all day yesterday working on that, and then fixed it today, yippee, but not having water in the kitchen, for most of two days, did add to the hectic feeling of things.

Tonight, I am helping Sam get out of town a couple days early and I'm subbing at the Castle. We are doing a similar sequence to group practice last friday with some additions to the PW sequence from me (mostly adding sarvangasana and a few related poses from the junior I syllabus. I've also been working on the revisions of the Philosopher Queens paper, reading Amy's writing group piece on the Turtle in Grapes of Wrath and reading Travis' dissertation.

I'm looking forward to this practice as it is rather sattva evoking and I can use some sattva at the moment. Tamas has crept in admist all the rajasic activity.

Anyway, here are the various sequences for the week.

We worked on inversions in San Marcos. Started off with some calf mashing. AMS, Tadasana, Urdhva Hastasana, Tadasana with sirsana arms. Sirsasana prep stages, 1-4. Utt. Chatushpadasana (2x) halasana with feet on chair, to Sarvangasana, viparita Karani.

Castle Hill Tuesday Class: Remember your Homework. Practice kicking up into AMVrk. If you can't get up yet, try three times a day. If you can get up with one leg, practice with the other leg. Keep working on that until there's no difference between the sides. (then comes two legs together).

Class at Castle Hill

AMVira.

AMS

Utt

Parvatasana in Virasana

Supta vira

AMS

Pariankasana

AMS

AMVrksasana, 2 x

Sirsasana

Amvira

Chatush

Sarvangasana prep chatush with feet up wall

Ujjayi 1 and III

Savasana

Here's what's on the docket for tonight.

Group practice sequence.

AMVira,
AMS
Utt
Supta vira with 3 square-ish shaped
AMS to observe

Supta vira second time round with blankets turned transverse and a block under the head.
Observe the difference in the pattern and ease of breathing in each way of doing.
AMS regular
Paryakasana, blocks,
AMS hands and feet together to further open the lungs and prepare for sirsasana
Sirsasana
Eka pada sirsasana
Parivrttaikapada sirsa legs apart only, not twisting
AMS
Ekapada AMS, related to ekapada and prvt ep sirsa
Vira I
Urdhva prasarita ekapadasana
[“an auxiliary Vira I”]
Vira I repeat
Vira II prep
Vira II full pose
AMVrksasana, 2 x
PMayura
3x; block and belt if needed; balance if you can
Vajrasana full pose, with belt around ankles as needed to really extend ankle and spread the feet.
Urdhva namaskarasana in vajra
Paschima namaskara in vajra
Urdhva mukha svanasana on tall blocks (anantasana side)
3x

Ustrasana
3x
block between knees; block betw thighs
hands turned out NOT like Sarvanga II (other way) to open chest fully like UMSvana

Drop-back work with block at top thighs, hands on buttocks
Dhanurasana
Once to see;
Twice more with thighs belted
Parsva dhanurasana
AMS
Virasana twisting
Uttanasana wide feet
Halasana
Cycle supta Konasana, Parsva
Eka Pada to
Sarvangasana
Eka pada, Parsva eka pada
Halasana

Savasana

Aristotle on Practice

2011-11-29T06:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a quote from philosophyworks.org Aristotle on practice, actually, practice is what he calls habituation, bascially, we become what we do.

“Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.”

So I've been doing a lot more yoga teaching lately and a lot more philosophy writing and some yoga and philosophy writing and some yoga and philosophy teaching, and that's what today has in store.

I start my first castle hill class, drive to waco, have a couple writing tasks that have to get done, then teach yoga and philosophy. It is nice to be starting a new venture of teaching just as the normal semester is ending. It makes me see that there's really no ending to doing the life of practice.

Sequence for san marcos, castle hill and group practice will follow before too long.

A really great weekend.

2011-11-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

I have to say that thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Part of it is that it is not "gift" oriented nor actually particularly "religiously" oriented. Okay, I realize that the Pilgrims were very religious people.. but still everyone regardless of religious background has the opportunity to celebrate gratitude. Where as Christmas a Christian holiday even though it has become a completely commericalized, there is still "a reason for the season" but if Christ is not your reason, then I imagine Christmas is sort of alienating or other.. or just whatever. Thanksgiving, however, it doesn't have the same requirement of faith. Of course, the practice of giving thanks is its own act of faith, but it doesn't require a particular set of faith commitments...

Thanksgiving has always been a relatively stress free holiday for me. Maybe because it is centered around getting together to share a meal, what could be more celebratory? and I love to eat.

For me too, it is infused with the start of my life of practice and I am always amazed with how meaningful it is to me that my yoga life started on Thanksgiving weekend. Yoga has brought me so much. In so many tangible ways, more ability to deal with the difficulties of my past, courage to face the future, and the serendipity of finding other people friends to a spouse on the path in my new life, it has been a thread of commonality for me and Christina since the beginning.

In recap, Thursday practice in San Marcos fabulous. Sam and I co lead a pretty intense arm balance and backbend practice. So interesting seeing the direct influence on Christina on her teaching and really the whole experience was a testimony to the blending of Iyengar and Anusara and now whatever else is coming up worlds. Four years ago, me, devon, michelle, and CT in the room. This year, the early fruits of the labor. very cool.

Friday, I went to teach Cue and Dorothy my lovely new students. Devon led several of us through a PW sequence from Santa Fe. It was such a direct transmission of the sattva Patricia was conveying and the perfect balance to the more rajastic practice of Thursday.

by the way, thursday night, we had dinner at devon's with sam and my parents and some other yoga friends of Devon's, again a blending of worlds.. and great food. the blending of great food leftovers yielded a totally fab subji tonigh and spelt tortillas fried in ghee are not unlike chapati...

Saturday, jeff and I practiced together, the actual yoga anniversary day, so thanksful that Jeff does yoga too. Actually, the first time we really practiced together (outside of classes and immersions) was thanksgiving morning 2008 at his parent's beach place in Galveston (pre hurricane) so beautiful the view... so there's special resonance there.

Today, I actually reorganized the yoga room, its sort of an experiment. I move the props out of the prop closet to give us more storage space and I imagine eventually we'll build a shelfing unit on the opposite wall of the soon to be built rope wall.

Tonight I went to hanging of the greens with my parents, which was really celebratory, came home at subji, and Jeff and I bottled some rockin wine. Paddington Station Syrah.

Thanksgiving Holiday

2011-11-23T06:25:00.000-08:00

Well, it's officially Thanksgiving break. As many of you know, my yoga anniversary is the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I took my first yoga class in 1994 with Walter Reece. Mom saw a flyer up on their first annual trip to Waco for Thanksgiving and she said, "Anne, I think you would really like yoga." So I went and I found that I did really like yoga.

This weekend will be filled with yoga practice and celebration with family and friends most of whom do yoga. I've got an inversion and backbend practice scheduled for me and Jeff this afternoon. Thursday is the practice down in San Marcos. Friday there's practice at Clear spring. Saturday I haven't quite decided how to celebrate the official anniversary day. Maybe I'll get up early and go to Peggy's class. I like to actually go to a class on the day of, since that was my first experience.

Yesterday afternoon, I taught 4 of my 10 students at Baylor (hard sell a 3:30 class the last day of class before break), but they were an enthusiastic intrepid group. We talked a bit about yoga and its influence on digestion over all, We did some calf mashing, supta virasana, supta BK and supt SUkasana (all things you can do post a meal) and then got upside down. (AMS, Sirsasana, Sarvagansana) and then M3.

It has been such a great experience teaching that class at Baylor. I have never been more enthusiastic about sharing my practice of yoga. Next semester, its back to Plato. I'm also really excited about the Plato seminar. More on that later.

Busy busy busy weekend

2011-11-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

Well, this weekend was a major yoga and philosophy weekend.

Last year, I agree to be local arrangements organizer for the Southwestern Philosophical Society. I had arranged for it to be this weekend so that I could attend the John Schumacher workshop in Dallas. Then that got cancelled and it turned out that George Purvis was in Austin this very weekend, so was going back and forth a lot between yoga land and philosophy land. Jeff and I stayed downtown at the Radisson, which is a pretty nice place and they were pretty helpful with all the event planning.

The whole weekend started off Thursday evening. We went to Mandy's last group practice in Austin. Mandy is a local Anusara teacher. Jeff and I really met because of her. She encouraged Jeff to take Christina's immersion which is where we met and we had our first coffee date after one of her classes and I asked Jeff out to Pam's disco Party after one of Mandy's classes, so it seemed very much like the end of a particular era of our lives with Mandy leaving for Santa Fe.

I gave my paper Friday afternoon on Socratic Narrative irony and it was well-received. Saturday and Sunday I went back and forth between yoga and philosophy sessions. I slept really hard last night.

One of the papers I heard at the conference, actually two, dealt with ways that we can be in the world so that we live authentically. Technology being a major treat to such existence. One paper suggested that we reembrace art as such a mode of existence, another paper was about a book the Shallows, that advocates we hold onto reading books which encourage depth of self-exploration rather breadth of self-expression ala the internet. I was thinking about yoga practice as a mode of non-technological self exploration. On the one hand, there is all sorts of technology around yoga practice, how to do, what to do, use this prop to do..the acquiring of knowledge about the poses. Then there's the whole yoga culture that does encourage a breadth of practice rather than depth. But at the same time, the essence of yoga is that our soul is beyond that techne and it is something that doesn't ultimately need techne to fix it. It doesn't need fixing. Our task is simply to see it for what it is. Yoga Sutra I:3 Then the seer sees its true nature. Really yoga practice is the techne of what 1:4 talks about, At other times, we identify with the fluctuations of citta. The whole of the yoga sutra is a kind of technical manual for dealing with those fluctuations. So yoga is a technology but a technology aimed at depth.

Another aspect of the techne of yoga struck me in a class the other day. Someone was getting frustrated because the kept falling out of a balancing pose and the teacher said, don't worry about it. "It's just data." Data we use the next time we do the pose. There is a way that we can view the body as a sort of machine that needs data that helps us view ourselves more objectively, so as not to identify with the fluctuations of body or mind. Obviously, we could go to far with the body as machine idea but in this context, I found it a very helpful metaphor. Much like the idea of the body as a vehicle for consciousness.

Another way of putting the point, yoga is an antidote to an instrumental view of the self.

San Marcos Sequence Week III

2011-11-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

Tadasana, work with block between feet and then between thighs
Urdhva Hastasana
paschima Hastasana with belt behind back.
Urdhva Baddanguliasana
Gomukasana arms only
Vira I, hands in UH and with hands behind back pulling on belt.
salabasana variation, feet on floor pulling back on belt with arms.
Bhujangasana
Makarasana
Ustrasana, hands on bolster.
Chatushpadasana
Halasana legs on chair
Eka Pada Sarvangasana
M3
Viparita Karani
Savasana

San Marcos Sequence Week I and II

2011-11-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone,

Jeff and I went to watch UNC play their opening game Friday night with Mom and Dad. We all rode the bus upto the Tavern. It was a lot of fun. Too loud. but fun. We made it until half time.

Saturday Jeff and I went to the farmers market, did some yoga at home and then drove down to San Antonio to go to a party that a friend of his was having. We spent the night down there and then took a leisurely drive back up 281.

Lovely weekend. I had a busy morning teaching a private yoga lesson, getting caught up on work stuff and preparing for week 2 of San Marcos school of yoga.

The session had really good attendance, all but two people signed up again from last time and a couple new people signed up. Good eager students down there.

At the same time, things are winding down with my Yoga and Philosophy capstone. It has been such a pleasure introducing yoga to this group of students. I think more than a few of them will stick with it. Some have made plans to take a class next semester with HP and they are all welcome to the wednesday at 5:30 practice that I'll do with Beth and Emily next semester.

Yoga and classes in general are like that. Endings are always a bit sad. Beginnings filled with excitement. What is nice about establishing a yoga practice is that it never really ends it just undergoes ongoing permutations, permutations intended to still the fluctuations of citta.

Here is the San Marcos Sequence from last week.

Tadasana
Urdhva Hastasana
Urhdva Baddanguliasana
paschima holding strap behind back
Vrksasana
Tadasana
AMS
Trikonasana
Parvotanasana concave back
Parivritta Trikonasana
AMS
Dandasana
MI
M3
Chatushpadasana
Savasana

Here's whats' on the docket for tonight.

Tadasana
UH, UB, shoulder stretch hands behind back.
Padangustasana
padahastasana
AMS
Supta pad I and II
Utthita Padangustasana
Vrk
Parsva Utthita Padangustasana
Prasarita Padottanasana
Chatushpadasana
Dandasana
parsva Dandasana
JS upright
ardha baddha padma paschiomottanasana upright
Bhardvajasana I
Paschimottanasana
Viparita Karani

A new project

2011-11-11T07:23:00.001-08:00

Well, I've been busy with lots of yoga and lots of philosophy lately. I'll write a more newsy post later, but thought you'd like to see the project narrative for an oral history grant I am applying for.

Project Narrative for Hatha Yoga Practice and Contemporary Faith Commitments

The Purpose of the Project

The purpose of this project is quite simple. I propose to interview a broad range of yoga students about how their yoga practice intersects with their traditional religious faith comments.

The motivation for this project is more complex. I was raised within a liberal strain of United Methodism. I also grew up in a multi-cultural context. To explain, I spent the first twelve years of my life in Westchester County, New York. There, many of my friends were Jewish and Catholic. My father worked with many Asians and Indians in his biochemistry lab. We were frequently invited into their homes for dinner. In junior high, my family moved Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Though this geographic context was decidedly more “Southern Evangelical Christian,” Chapel Hill was a university town. I had friends from other faith traditions in my immediate circle of friends. I also met many people who had no explicit faith tradition for the first time in my life. I share these details about my life to illustrate a point that is relevant to the research I plan to undertake in this oral history project. From a very early age, I knew that the Christianity that I practiced was one of many ways that humans expressed their relationship with God.

I came to yoga practice in my late twenties a year after I got a job at Baylor (Fall 1993). Baylor was a very different environment that any I had encountered. It was both religiously and politically more conservative than anywhere I had lived previously. I felt a bit at sea existentially. I had recently married and acquired a ten-year-old stepdaughter to help raise. I was struggling with the demands of my first job, which at that time included a 4-4 teaching load, along with expectations to publish research. I desperately needed a space to relax. My mother suggested I try yoga. She had practiced yoga in the 1970’s and had recently returned to the practice. I attended my first yoga class at the old Lake Air Mall the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1994. Every Thanksgiving, I say a special prayer of Thanksgiving for the circumstances in my life that led me to yoga practice. From the beginning, yoga has changed my life. It has made me calmer, more relaxed, more focused, more present, more attentive to the demands of everyday experience and more experiential in my relationship with God. As a philosopher, I tend to have a rather intellectualized view of God, this was true even as a child. However, the experience of a good yoga class or solitary practice brings me in touch with how the Psalmist describes the calming effect of being in the presence of God in Psalm 23.2. Simply put, yoga helps me experience the space where I can practice God’s command of Psalm 46:10 to “be still and know that I am God.” My yoga practice has brought me to the spiritual space where that sort of deep communion with God is an ongoing reality.

Almost immediately, many people I encountered at Baylor were curious about why I did yoga. At least in my untenured mind, their questions often had an undertone of skepticism about its benefit or a current of suspicion about why I, a philosophy teacher at a Baptist university, would be so interested in a practice that has its roots in the Hindu culture of the Indian Sub-continent. After a few such encounters, I learned to keep my interest in yoga quiet.

Despite the skepticism of my colleagues, I continued to practice yoga. Eventually, I started teaching yoga locally and I started attending regional and national workshops to improve my practice. In 2000, I started training in the Iyengar Yoga tradition, a method known for its rigorous commitment to physical alignment. Eventually, I opened a small studio in Waco and taught classes to the Waco community for many years. In 2007, I received my certification in Iyengar Yoga. Until very recently, I tried to keep my yoga life and my Baylor life separate, two different spheres of existence.

Two years ago, a Baylor colleague, Mark Long, asked me to start teaching him yoga. I started teaching a class to him and other interested staff and faculty at Baylor. My decision to teach this weekly class, bridged the gap between these two parts of my life. I realized it was selfish of me not to share the enormous benefits of yoga with those I work with closely. Motivated by that experience, I proposed a BIC capstone course on Yoga and Philosophy. I am teaching it this semester for the first time. Ten students are enrolled. This class is the most joyful teaching experiences I have had in my eighteen years of teaching at Baylor.

Research Plan

Background Research- Setting the Context

I am not alone in my love of yoga. Hatha yoga practice is extremely popular in America. According to a recent survey in Yoga Journal, approximately 15 million people practice yoga in the United States. The skepticism toward yoga in Christian evangelical circles, the skepticism that I would often sense in some of my colleagues, remains. In fact, it is stronger than ever. For example, a Seattle-based minister, Mark Driscoll, calls yoga “demonic” and argues that it can't be separated from its Hindu roots in order to make it acceptable practice for Christians. Leading evangelist, Al Mohler, wrote about yoga on his blog and ended with the claim that “The embrace of yoga is a symptom of our postmodern spiritual confusion, and, to our shame, this confusion reaches into the church.” In a recent article in Waco Today Elizabeth Morten Oates outlines numerous arguments on both sides of the debate about whether Christians should practice yoga. Ultimately, she concludes that the health benefits of yoga outweigh concerns about its possibly corruptive influence, unless one is weak in one’s Christian faith and is the sort of person who might be tempted into other religious practices. Some Christian advocates of yoga, perhaps sensitive to the concerns of evangelicals like Mohler, Driscoll and others, have created style of yoga that they see as Christian friendly, Praise Moves, is the most famous example. For example, they do not use Sanskrit names for poses. They place their yoga mats in the shape of a cross. They recite Bible verses in class and link the yoga poses to Biblical references of eagles, trees, lions and lambs. While I admire the attempt to integrate Christian faith with yoga practice, I think there are other ways to go about it. One can maintain the integrity of a more traditionally-grounded yoga practice and the integrity of one’s faith commitment. I hope that this research project furthers that goal.

More deeply, I find the evangelical view about the spiritual temptation that yoga presents disconcerting. I regard the evangelical skepticism toward yoga as an unnecessary divisive stance to uphold amongst people of faith. Beyond that, it that is antithetical to the true spirit of Christianity that teaches us to love one another as who we truly are. My hope is that these interviews and the written work that they generate will help ease the worries that evangelicals have with respect to yoga practice and will illustrate how yoga practice can enhance the faith commitments of people from many different religious traditions.

As I mentioned previously, own experience suggests that yoga has brought me deeper into my religious experience, not further from it. One prominent senior Iyengar teacher, Manouso Manos, once told me, “I know a lot of people who start yoga as atheists. I don’t know anyone who keeps on doing yoga and remains an atheist.” This observation is based on over thirty years of his public teaching life. He has seen literally thousands of yoga students come across his path. That yoga practice leads even the atheist to a more theistic position is not surprising. In Light on Life, B.K.S Iyengar writes, “Yoga is a universal path.” I take his claim to mean that people of any faith tradition can practice yoga and that yoga will enhance any faith commitments that a person holds. His daughter, Geeta Iyengar, elaborates further on this topic. In a recent issue of Yoga Rahasya, the main publication of the Iyengar community, she answered a set of questions regarding the following topic: “Does the cultural and religious background of a practitioner influence their practice? She remarks, “I have never had to emphasize that this my religion and that is your religion in the teaching process.” However, she does acknowledge, “Cultural background does make a difference. It becomes difficult for people coming from different cultural backgrounds to adopt a different discipline but I convinced them in a different style which is irrespective of their religious or cultural background.” Geeta Iyengar concludes the interview with this observation, “Whatever be our background or religion, we all face these six enemies of the human mind.” According to the yoga philosophy that underpins her statement, these enemies of the human mind are desire, anger, greed, infatuation, pride and jealousy. These enemies are not so different that the Christian understanding of the seven deadly sins.

Getting Ready to Walk the Dog

2011-10-30T10:06:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I are hanging out at home a bit. Just made yummy breakfast tacos and are getting ready to take Milo to the Dog park, or at least for a walk in the field near our house. Then we'll come back and do a practice. I'm thinking a nice supta series and some upside downs, something mellow. Might work a bit on some of the junior I syllabus as well.

I enjoyed all the teaching I did at the Castle the last couple weeks, but I'm looking forward to having a bit more time for my own practice and getting back to my writing schedule which I tend to let get disrupted when I travel.

had an urge to send in the form to go back to Pune today. 2013 or 2014 I imagine.

BIC class continues to go well. I am really amazed how much the students like inversions. Very cool.

Checking back in

2011-10-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

I've gotten two good nights of sleep in a row and feel very focused and full of energy, which is good, because I have a lot I want to do the rest of this week. I got up and meditated. Jeff and I bought a singing bowl while we were in NYC. There's this really nice store called the Land of Buddha and we've wanted one for about three years now and finally, I figured let's just get it. It is pretty cool and the owner has great incense in the store as well. We also went to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan art which was so inspiring about contemplative life. Also so humbling in that there's just this amazingly rich tradition/ really traditions of contemplative practice that I know next to nothing about.

We went to three really great yoga classes, James Murphy, Gennie Kapuler, and Brook Myer. Picked up lots of great detail in all three classes. The level of instruction at the NYC institute is amazing. It is a good example of the company you keep and the influence it has on practice. High standards.

Let's see the reason I was in NYC, the philosophy conference. My paper was well received, though the audience was small, 9:00 AM on Saturday morning is a tough one. I did touch base with a former student of mine, Marcos Draco, who is finishing his degree at Stonybrook. He actually lives in State College and teaches some there, funny how lives intersect in various ways.

Also, ate some great food and drank some great wine courtesy of Natalie Tapken, another former student, now famous wine sommalier. It is always great to talk with her and see a philosopher in action out there in the "non-philosophy" world.

We also went down to see the protesters at Wall Street, ate Tukish food, saw my friend james, and just generally had a great time.

Got back mondy night and I had a full day mostly teaching yoga, for mandy down here then up in waco. I introduced my Baylor students to arm balances and we worked on a ton of Adho Mukha Vrksasana in Focus on Form.

Well, off to read heidi's paper for writing group, do some edits on my paper from NYC then edits on conclusion, then practice that lovely PW twisting sequence a bit later in the morning.

Getting Ready for NYC

2011-10-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I leave tomorrow for a few days in NYC. As always, there is the last minute flurry of activity getting ready to go. I've pretty much packed but there's still the gathering of the last minute stuff.

I also agreed to teach the group practice tonight, so that made things a little more hectic, but I'm glad I taught, because I got a good twist practice in and Jeff and I went out to Whole Foods for a date afterwards so it ended up feeling like a good thing to do to get ready for the trip rather than a running around at the last minute thing.

I really love being able to go to NYC this time of year for the conference. I also get to do a lot of yoga at the Institute, see my friend James and my former student Natalie, in all it is just a wonderful time. Also, this year we have various Turkish market's to check out.

So I drop Milo off at puppy school tomorrow, then we are going to try out parking at the Parking Spot and getting the car washed while we are away.

Will check in a few times in NYC.

Here's the Intro to the Paper I am giving in NYC

2011-10-19T19:24:00.001-07:00

Entering the Public Sphere: Plato’s Protagoras as an Exhortation to Academics in Contemporary America

Contemporary liberal arts educators, be they philosophers or academics of another stripe, frequently use Plato’s portrait of Socrates in the Apology as a model for their pedagogical endeavors. Like Socrates, we believe the unexamined life is not worth living. Like Socrates, we encourage our students to think beyond the received views of their contemporary culture. Many of us, particularly in the humanities, view the value of a liberal arts education as intrinsic to that education. We the classroom see it as an ongoing opportunity to engage in the intellectual practices that enrich our daily lives. We tacitly agree with John Henry Newman’s view of Liberal Education as an end in itself. In his famous set of lectures The Idea of a University, he boldly claims that “Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.... As a means of reflecting on his claim that “Everything has its own perfection," he asks the reader to consider

Why do you take such pains with your garden or your park? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies; to your trees and drives; not as if you meant to make an orchard of the one, or corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is special beauty in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain and slope, brought all together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole.
Newman’s point is clear. Just as we seek and cultivate beauty in the world around us, we find beauty in the thoughtful ruminations of our minds. As liberal arts educators, we attempt to share this intrinsic love of learning with our students.
Unfortunately, many dimensions of the “world around us” reinforce the pervasive view that the value of a college education rests primarily in terms of the extrinsic goods it provides: a high-paying job, useful business connections, entry into a prestigious medical, law, or business school, entry into a highly ranked graduate program. Indeed, students and their parents pay increasingly large amounts of money in college tuition and fees in order to insure a lucrative post college career. The increasing cost of higher education no doubt contributes to the consumerist mindset that many students exhibit with respect to their education. They often act as if they are entitled to a degree simply because they have paid for it. Given these material realities, it is not surprising that students often have difficulty seeing liberal education as an end in itself. The possibility that there could be a very different set of values lurking in the books, lectures and discussions they have purchased remains at best obscure, at worst a laughably quixotic lament from some former age of leisure.
In this paper, I turn to the prologue of Plato’s Protagoras. It provides several models of pedagogy that can help both teachers and students navigate these difficult waters.

Sequences and summations from San Marcos Series I

2011-10-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I had a great time teaching the first six week session down in San Marcos. Excellent studentship across the board. Almost everyone came to every class and people seem eager and ready to learn, a great teaching experience. A new all levels sessions starts Nov 7 and a brand new person has already signed up. The course will continue to accommodate beginners but is an all levels class. At some point, the class will grow enough in numbers and ability, that we will offer a new beginner session on a different evening, but that is a ways in the future.

Craig asked about yoga books, Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar is the one to get if you are only getting one. It is really the Bible of yoga practice.

Here are some things to work on during the two week hiatus. Shoulder stretches, seated poses, standing poses, getting upside down every day.

Here's the sequence from Monday, Sukasana, Dandasana, Baddha Konasana, Dandasana, Upavistha Konasana, Siddasana, Dandasana Virasana, Calf mashing in virasana,
AMS, chest opening work with block under sternum and supporting head, worked with all three heights according to ability, chair chest opening, sit in front of chair and reach back and grab top sides of chair, then seat of chair and lower buttucks down,

beginning chair dwi pada with legs bent, chair twists, chair savasana with roll under blanket.

This morning I taught Focus on Form. One of Mandy's students, Carrie had requested an inversion sequence, so that is what we did. We started off with some shoulder work, then AMS, then UTt with blocks on back of calves at wall, then same with AMS then partner ams pressing blocks against hamstrings, AM vrk, AMvrk with feet up wall, Pincha prep on floor, then elbows on blocks, anantasasana, PM with strap and block and blanket roll, then sirsasana at wall, chatush, setu B with horizontal block, vertical block, and v brick setu bandha, brief halasana to sarvangasana, savasana with legs resting on blanket. except for adding in the twists it is pretty much my basic inversion sequence.

I'll probably do one or the other of those classes this afternoon up in Waco, plus we are talking about the effects of asana and pranayama in the philosophy talk section of clas.

I'm having fun teaching yoga more. I'm also having fun writing more. I worked a bit more on the AI piece for Sarah Connor Chronicles and started revising my paper for SAGP. Protagoras as public intellectual.

Looking forward to my annual trip to New York. Probably will take a bit of a break from gluten free living for a few days.

San Marcos sequence Week Five

2011-10-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Here's what we worked on in Class Monday

Tadasasan
Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana leg up on back of chair
Utthita Hasta Padangustasana with belt and support of the wall.
Parsva Utthita Hasta Padangustasana leg up on back of chair.
Parsva Utthita Hasta Padangustasana with belt and support of wall.
AMS on Chair.
Trikonasana
Trikonasana front foot on block
trkonasana experimenting with turning head down to floor, then center then up.
Vira III holding onto chair, then wall, then did with support of tall benches and chairs for feet and hands,
AMS on chair
sirsasana experimenting with trifold blanket
sarvangasana rolling over into halasana

fun times, if you have never tried supported vira III give it a go. lovely. all this is based on the work we did with Swati up in Dallas. asana for the sake of the spine for the sake of pranayama.

Gratitude

2011-10-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

I am in this amazing writing group. Four philosophers and a french literary specialist who is married to one of the philosophers in the group. We are all quite broad in our conception of philosophy, generally historical and continental and it is quite a haven from the analytic world of my department.

So many things are great about the group. 1. An immediate sense of audience. I don't feel like I'm writing into the void of academic scholars. 2. Accountability. If it is my turn, I know I have to get my next segment of writing done in time for them to read it before our meetings. 3. Fun and productive conversation at the meetings themselves. 4. Inspiration with respect to seeing the progress other people are making. 5. An ongoing reminder that there are many other interesting things to write about besides Platonic narrative 6. Great feedback on my writing.

I'm in the midst of appreciating point six right now. I'm going through Heidi Bostic's copy edits on my Republic chapter. In addition to being a French Englightment Scholar and chair of MFL, idea was also a copy editor a press or a journal during grad school. Wow the little stuff she sees. It is truly humbling to know that someone, in fact, more than someone, all the members of the group, are reading my writing with such care and attention. Sometimes the comments are broader and more global other times they are a lot about en dashes and em dashes and I have to say I'm still unclear on when to use each, but I just do what Heidi says.

I'm a bit weary from the work right now because I've been at it about an hour and a half and normally I would take a break by visiting Facebook land, but since I'm off facebook until Monday, I am doing a blog entry instead. Instead of cruising about looking at the status of the lives of others, I'm actually taking a few moment to delve more deeply to what is on my mind.

Yesterday, I subbed for Mandy's Focus on Form class and taught a lot of supta padangusthasana II actions and how they related to various standing poses and it was really lovely seeing the effect of that detailed work on people's poses. You could really see the inner body relaxing. Then drove up to Waco and taught the yoga and philosophy class. We had a great conversation about various obstacles to seeing the inner self. In Sutra I.30 and I.31 Patanjali ennumerates them,

1.30 vyadhi styana samsaya pramada alasya avirati bhrantidarsana alabdhabhumikatva anavasthitatvani cittaviksepah te antarayah
These obstacles are disease, inertia, doubt, heedlessness, laziness, indiscipline of the senses, erroneous views, lack of perseverance, and backsliding.

1.31 duhkha daurmanasya angamejayatva svasaprasvasah viksepa sahabhuvah
Sorrow, despair, unsteadiness of the body and irregular breathing further distract the citta.

We had a good conversation about the difference between lack of perseverance and backsliding and doubt and also whether these obstacles were necessarily bad. Not necessarily in the sense that their presence can function as our guru, teaching us how to remove them, easier said than done.

All that seemed a bit depressing so we also talked about Sutra 1.33

maitri karuna mudita upeksanam sukha duhkha punya apunya visayanam bhavanatah cittaprasadanam
Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.

And 2.16 Heyam dukham anagatam. The pain that is yet to come can and should be avoided.

On the way out of class, Syndee remarked that she's been telling her friends, that they really need to get the sutras into their life. what a great bumper sticker that would make.

The other fascinating part of class was during asana. I asked if people had any requests and Kyneshawau said, since it is just women today... (Dan was absent due to a surgery) "are there any poses for cramps?" I said, "Yes. In fact, there is a whole menstrual sequence." They all gasped and said, "really." I said, "Yes." So we did a version of it in class and it was really great for so many reasons. One they all looked tired and it is a nice restorative sequence even when you don't have your period and 2. I really felt such an amazing sense of gratitude to share the power of this sequence with a group of young women in their early twenties. How great to have this knowledge so young. I also gave a pep talk about the importance of yoga and inversions overall to improve symptoms associated with painful periods. What a day!

Adventures in Blog Land

2011-10-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

I just visited Facebook. I've been checking in about once a week. So far, I'm much more productive writing wise and I would just say generally more focused mentally. There are definitely people I only communicated with in that forum that I would still like to communicate with, but not enough to continue on regularly.

I figure how hard is it to follow a blog.

now that I'm not posting regularly, I don't think of my life so much in status updates. I do think more about blog posts I want to write. So it is back to adventures in blog land.

It has been about a week since I checked in here as well. I had a busy weekend doing yoga. We had a really great twisting practice on Friday. Saturday morning I taught Peggy's 8 AM class and did some poses from Intro for the Intro people going up and some Junior I poses from my syllabus. Then I taught inversions at the Austin Yoga Festival. That was sort of a trip. It was raining in the morning, then windy and sunny. I've never taught yoga on a cement patio to a bunch of people wearing sunglasses, but it was fun. About twenty people got upside down including one fearless young woman Mindy who was attending this as her very first yoga class ever.

Saturday Jeff and I had dinner with his friend Eric and Sunday Jeff and I spent the day hanging out together. We also watched 127 hours, which is a very intense movie about a rock climber who ends up cutting off his own arm in a freak rock climbing situation. It was very sisyphus like it a certain way. When he realizes that he had in fact chosen the path that led to being stuck in this particular rock and a hard place, he was kind of free. Mentally anyway, then he got physically free. It is a true story, Aaron Ralston, is his name. I'm going to read the book, aptly titled, Between A Rock and A Hard Place.

Jeff is out in Arizona helping his father and uncle put the ashes of his 100 year old grandfather in their resting place, so I'm on my own for a few days.

Back to writing a bit more, then yoga in San Marcos.

Busy Day

2011-10-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

Today is one of those days where I have so much to do that it feels overwhelming and all I wanted to do this morning was go back to bed. But I didn't. I kept with the momentum I've been establishing with respect to writing and low and behold I have a rough draft of the conclusion to A Philosophic Muse. A couple of the sections are still pretty sketchy, but I think it flows. I'll work on it a bit more tomorrow and send it onto writing group. I also got a ton of email work done that has been in my mental to do list.

I'm sort of mentally exhausted now. I think Jeff and I are going to talk Milo to the dog park and then I'm going to teach a private lesson at 3, then get upside down myself.

Here's the sequence we worked on in San Marcos School of Yoga this week we did a pretty similar one in class but added in adho mukha vrksasana instead of vrksasana.

Tadasana with blocks at ankles, knees and top thighs, three times with block at different places.
Urdhva Hastasana
Arm stretches at the wall,
Vrksasana knee and wall and working on getting arms behind ears by bending elbows
AMS
Sirsasana
Sarvangasana walking up the wall
M3.

Here's a description of what I'll be teaching at the Austin Yoga Festival

2011-10-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

B.K.S. Iyengar refers to headstand and shoulderstand (sirsasana and sarvangasana) as the father and mother of yoga asanas. The metaphor he employs conveys how important he thinks inversions are for yogis and yoginis. Nonetheless, many people are afraid of inversions. They often wonder if inversions are safe and when someone is ready to practice them. In all likelihood, you are more ready than you think to embrace these powerful poses. In this practice based class, I will answer many of these questions. Please come with whatever questions you have about inversions. I will be happy to answer them. I am passionate about the value of inversions and love sharing that passion with others. Quite literally, they have changed my life. I used to suffer from allergy, asthma, anxiety, mild depression, painful menses and through inversion practice, these conditions have diminished dramatically and in some cases simply no longer plague me at all. We will go through a sequence of poses designed to help you prepare yourself for a daily home inversion practice.

The first part of class we will work on shoulder opening poses that help us access the strength and flexibility in the shoulders needed to practice inversions.

The second part of class, we will look explore, Adho Mukasvanasana, Prasarita Paddottanasana and Uttansana (down dog, extended wide apart foot pose, and standing forward bend) as preparations for Sirsasana. They are also good poses to do when you are unable to practice sirsasa.

In the third part of class, we will look at some preliminary steps to work toward sirsasana and sirsasana itself for those who would like to try the pose.

In the fourth part of class, we will explore, chatushpadasana, setu bandha sarvangasana and Viparita karani (four limbed pose, bridge pose and legs up the wall /inverted lake pose) as preparations for sarvanganasana.

In the fifth part of class, we will look at several approaches to sarvangasana itself.

Finally, we will do a few twists and savasana to round out the practice.

Come join in the fun. Please bring a mat a strap and blankets if you have them. Some blankets will be provided by the festival, but it is always nice to have more.

The class is at 12:30 in the Shanti pavillion at Feista Gardens, go to http://www.austinyogafestival.com/schedule/ for more info about the festival.

Here's Anne's Public Yoga Schedule for this Fall

2011-10-04T09:30:00.001-07:00

Yoga with Anne in Austin this Fall

Austin Yoga Festival.

Saturday October 8 12:30 Get upside down the right way.

Austin School of Yoga.

I am subbing Peggy’s Advanced class Saturday 8 AM on Oct 8 and Nov 5 $18 drop in rate.

I am teaching a Rope Wall Class Nov 5 3-5 cost $40.
I am teaching an Inversion class Dec 3 3-5 cost $40.

Castle Hill Fitness.

I am subbing Focus on Form at 9:30 on the Following Dates.

10-11, 10-13, 10-18, 10-25, 10-27, 10-31 (check this date to be sure) 11- 4

Clear Spring Studio.

I co-lead an advanced practice most Fridays at 4:30-6:30. Cost $10.
Dates for the practices are Oct 7, 14, 21, 28 Nov 4, Dec 2, 9, 16.
Check website (iyengaryogainaustin.blogspot.com)

I am teaching a restorative workshop Dec 17 3-5 cost 40.

San Marcos School of Yoga

Monday’s 5:30-6:45. Two more classes in this session. New six week session starts Nov 7. $60 for the whole series or $15.00 per class.

Sam Rice and I will co lead a thanksgiving practice from 10-2:30 cost $20.00

I am also available for Private lessons $70.00 in my home. $85.00 at other locations. Contact me via email at AnneBowery@yahoo.com

Seeds, writing, yoga, twisiting, teaching, technology

2011-10-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

Lots of thoughts running through my brain, all of them more or less related to the interconnections between things. Another version of panta rei. For example, my difficulty in twisting. Some poses are almost like writer's block. It just seems like the words don't come. The solution is always sitting down, always practicing, but it is frustrating when discernable progress is slow, like getting A Philosophic Muse finished. it is a lot like twisting, a little here a little there,

It helps to have a schedule. This week the conclusion to A Philosophic Muse is on the docket. I really did not feel like leaving the Republic chapter edits, but I am up next week in writing group and I want them to read a draft of the conclusion so I have to get it to them by Friday. At first, I procrastinated, even by practicing a few twists, but then I sat down and looked at what I already had. I saw some structure, cut a few things, but still felt uninspired, but then just looking at the prose, must have stimulated something in my mind, planted a seed, or a seed took root and before I sat down to read my students' yoga blogs, I thought of some new sentences to write and now most of the second section of the conclusion has a shape.

My students have been very taken with the notion of these seeds that our yoga practice plants. Though in the yoga context, it is clearly related to karma, it is not that different from various Biblical insights like, as you sow, so you shall reap, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Seeds can take a long time to take root, and not all seeds make it, but the planting of the seed, the planting of the intention is what is most important.

My students also love inversions. I've been planting seeds about them from day one and now we are at them and the seeds have definitely taken root. Every student had at least something positive to say about them. Quite exciting. I love inversions also and sharing what Ilove about them is great.

Yoga teachng in general is going quite well. I've just hit a higher plane of enjoyment around it. I'm glad I decided to stick with it and not "just practice." I would never have seen the other side of the rather lengthy lull.

And finally technology, I just watched Jeff argue with Time Warner about getting faster cable service. I really hate dealing with that sort of thing and I really felt loved that he took care of it, but also I could see the patience of his practice and his knowledge of things technological coming through as he dealt with the insanity of trying to do something outside the box that Time Warner tries to put you in.

Off to teach in San Marcos. We'll do some shoulder work, then a few standing poses, a brief go at headstand and another look at shoulder stand.

Between Sessions during the Lois Workshop

2011-10-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been a busy week, teaching yoga and philosophy wise, and a busy weekend as well. Right now, I'm in the last minutes of the lunch break for the Lois Steinberg workshop. I travel so much to go to yoga workshops that it is really nice to have a yoga workshop in your own hometown. it is great to come home for lunch and take a nap.

this particular workshop also has a nice break in between sessions, which is often not the case. Lois got on my case a bit about twisting poses, I do work on them. She said at least one practice a week has to be all twistings and I don't do that every week. So I'll make a commitment to that in addition to what I do every day. Look for more twists in the Friday practices.

One of the things BKS says about yoga frequently is that "the subject is vast." So true. I'm reminded of that whenever I'm in the presence of a senior teacher such as Lois who has spent a whole lifetime directly under the tutelage of the Iyengars. For instances, I know a few things about how to relax the tongue, take the tongue away from the roof of the mouth, let the tongue lie flat, let the back of the tongue relax but she said "make the back of the tongue as narrow as the front of the tongue" boy did that work and it is just one small part of the body.

we are where we are however. That's a lesson I've been working with a lot. How to be were we are but not complacent with where we are.

I taught inversions for the first time in the Baylor class and that was a blast. Taught a pranayama class, that was less well attended. Maybe I won't announce it before hand next time. It went well too. It is so great teaching in that context and I'm enjoying the San marcos class also.

The day of inversions was sort of a stressful day for me at work, yes, I do occasional have those, and i thought to myself, I really need to get upside down before class so I don't unload on the students. I went into Morrison and the chairs were already arranged and the floor vaccumed and it already felt like the classroom was transformed to yoga space. Just walking in I felt better and i though why not be upside down as the students are walking in since that's what I'm teaching today. It was a blast. A couple walked in just shaking their head, but everyone got up into both head and shoulderstand.

Developing a writing schedule and spending the week off Facebook has also created a good deal of psychic time for me. Sort of like clearing the space to practice yoga. Clearing the space and setting the intention to write more regularly. I write a lot, but still having a schedule with dedicated plans is more like practicing with a plan in mind, following a sequence rather than just generally knowing what you need to do and getting some of it done.
I didn't send in a paper abstract which I had planned to but I may just do that tomorrow (even though my schedule gives me weekends off).

I missed Facebook a bit but I like not constantly checking to see what's going on.

San Marcos sequence and class sequence for tuesday.

2011-09-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

Tadasana
Urdhva Hastasana
Urdhva Baddanguilasana.
paschima baddanguilasana.
baddha hasta in tadasana
gomukasana
AMS on chair
Parsvottanasana with chair extending chair away from you
pasasana on chair
bharadvajasana on chair
AMS on chair
chatushpadasana
Sarvangasana with feet up on chair holding chair legs.
ujjayi, 1, 3, and 2
savasana.

the Ebb and Flow of things

2011-09-26T18:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly sure when I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I definitely did not in junior high or high school. I just couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life in high school and though I was smart, I was not really that intellectually oriented in high school.

Sometime in college, because of five individuals who took a serious interest in me as person and my intellectual development, I realized I could spend the rest of my life doing what they did. I really loved the college classroom experience, the small liberal arts classroom experience. It was really there that the world of ideas opened up for me as something to experience outside of reading books. I did feel like I could spend the rest of my life in a college classroom.

Then, at some point I realized that graduate school was the path to becoming a college teacher and off to philosophy grad school I went. I didn't actually teach much in grad school because I had fellowships and when I did teach it was 150 students in the room and not really so fun, well it was fun as performance, but I was still getting over being shy back then and so I had to get over stage fright every morning, but once I was up there it was okay. I knew it wasn't what I experienced as a student, but I knew I could do it.

Baylor has really been the cauldron where I developed my craft as a teacher and I do love the college classroom on the other side of the chalk, sometimes even more than I did as a student.

Similarly, I didn't set out wanting to be a yoga teacher. In fact, one of the things I really liked about yoga at first was that I was a student again. I was back in the classroom learning. But then Walter said teach and I started to slowly and slowly built a practice of teaching in Waco. It was slow going, but by the time I left Waco for Austin. I had three well attended weekly classes and it was a tough decision to give them up.

It has been difficult finding a space to teach in Austin for a variety of reasons. By space, I don't mean actual place but a space for what I have to offer in this milieu. In fact, I was pretty close to stopping teaching back in May. However, now things have really gone the other way. I'm really liking teaching in San Marcos. I have a couple of new private students that are lovely and teaching yoga is really fun again for the first time in a few years.

And the yoga and philosophy class has really helped that too. I really feel the most comfortable in that context. It truly is the best of both teaching worlds.

So everything flows, as Heraclitus says.

A thought on Technology and practice

2011-09-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

I got fed up with the new Facebook format this week and decided to stop posting there for awhile. I really liked it when I could just see what all my friends were upto, but now it is just hard to see everyone and it is so cluttered with things by groups and individuals who post all the time that I really spend so much time wading through things that it became more frustrating than fun to me.

Technology is frequently frustrating to me. It is supposed to make life easier and then it changes all the time and you have to learn some new hard thing to make your life easier. I frequently think to myself, I just want it to stay the same.

One of the last Facebook posts that caught my eye before I signed off for a while is from a friend and colleague Chris Long at Penn State. He said he's not really a fan of Facebook but that he admired its willingness to iterate and reiterate itself and that was a positive model. Now Chris is very much a techie sort of person, but beyond that he is also relentlessly optimistic in a nice way that makes you want to be more that way also and so I thought, well, that's true.

We should be willing to change. Take practice for instance. One of the "fun" things about yoga practice is that there's always something else to work on, you get this pose, you get another, you get this muscle you get a layer of skin to work on. The reward for doing a good job with practice is something harder to do.

Yoga practice too is sort of like technology. It is definitely a set of tools aimed at helping you achieve some end, whether that end is more flexibility or samadhi.. And while the tools themselves may not change what they offer us as we become more adept with the tools does change.

The insight has not made me return Facebook. I've decided to blog more and give google plus a try and besides that I'll have a bit more time to practice!

Philosophy Writing Day

2011-09-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

Wednesdays are pretty big writing days for me. Tuesdays and Thursdays are pretty busy with commuting and Baylor related things, Mondays and Fridays I write but also tend to have more life maintenance things to do as well. Wednesdays are the days I really get down to what needs to get written for the week. I have some vague memory of my studies that Mercury is associated with writing and this day is auspicious to Mercury. Anyway, in general, I am an advocate of the brief, daily session of writing. Get a little bit done every day and eventually, things will get done. However, I also find that sometimes you just have to sit down and write a lot more than that. In that sense, writing is like practice. you have to do it every day to really be a writer. You have to get the words out there on the page, just like you have to roll out your yoga mat every day to have a daily practice, but sometimes it is just great to go to a workshop and do nothing else but yoga. The practices are similar in other ways. There are rules or guidelines about proper practice, proper prose, but in the end it is your practice, your prose. You can always refine your prose, you can always refine your poses... Also, writing tends to bring up all the vrittis, those painful and not, and it is a pretty good template for confronting the kleshas as well. Ignorance, Ego, Pleasure, Aversion, even fear of death all crop up. Keep writing. Keep practicing.

So today was a good writing day in that I actually finished something, at least finished for now. I finished the sex and the city paper I've been working on for the past couple of months. It isn't really done, but it is off to the editors for them to read and it will be at least a little while before they get it back to me with corrections and then I'll be back at it. Practice is like that too. It isn't like it is ever done, but sometimes, you get to a particular place and decide to look at another part of practice.

Right now, I'm moving back into a phase of yoga practice where I'm teaching a good bit more. I've started the class in san marcos. I'm teaching the yoga and philosophy in waco. I have a couple ongoing private lessons in the beginning stages and I'm subbing a lot for Mandy at Castle Hill. I have to say I'm enjoying teaching in Waco and San Marcos much more than I have enjoyed public class teaching in Austin thus far. People seem really receptive and perhaps because there's less available, its easier for people to appreciate what is there.

Anyway, here's the San Marcos sequence from Monday.

Adho Mukha Virasana with support of bolster and blocks
Adho Muka Swanasana, head supported
Uttanasana head supported
Tadasana, work with block between feet and then between thighs
Urdhva Hastasana
paschima Hastasana with belt behind back.
Vira I, hands in UH and with hands behind back pulling on belt.
salabasana variation, feet on floor pulling back on belt with arms.
Bhujangasana
Makarasana
Ustrasana, hands on bolster.
AMS
Parsva Utt
Viparita Karani
Savasana

The Rose and the Cross

2011-09-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

There's this story about a bad housekeeper who receives a perfect rose as a gift. She puts the rose in a dirty vase and realizes that the vase needs cleaning. Once the vase is holding the lovely rose, she puts it on a table and suddenly realizes that she needs to dust the table. Once the table is clean, the room looks a bit dingy, so she cleans the room and then the room next to it and so on.

I got a new car recently, which happens to be red, and it has had a similar effect on my organizational life. Jeff and I had to make space for the car in the garage and that caused us to start organizing other things in the house and those in turn have stimulated other plans and there's now just a kind of momentum toward getting the house how we really want it, how it will serve us and the work we want to do and the life we want to have best.

Yoga practice is like that two. In fact, the two cleanest rooms in my house are my meditation room and the yoga room. but on a deeper level, making space for yoga practice in life in turn forces other decisions in life. One of my students, antonia, was mentioning that she has noticed even her decision to practice yoga, begins to have a calming effect on the mind. before she even starts yoga itself, the mental vritti toward it is a good seed.

Last week in class, I walked into the room and everyone was just pretty tired and I got the sense that we needed to do some restorative sequence, which I had not shared with them yet. We spend some time sharing a bit about career goals before that and touched a a bit on the first sutra of pada two which is Tapas, Svadyaya, and Ishvara Pranidhani are the acts of yoga. Burning zeal, self-study and surrender to god. That in turn, led to a brief conversation about yoga and spiritual life, specifically yoga and Christianity. There's an article in this months' Waco Today that asks "Should Christians practice yoga." It lists the various arguments for and against and ultimately I think comes down on the side that it is okay for Christians who are strong in their faith...

One my students shared a story that she was telling another teacher about how much she liked yoga and how much similarity she saw with it and Christianity and this person said, "Well, obviously you don't know much about Christianity." We all kind of collectively gasped that this was uttered in someone's out loud voice and talked a bit more. On the positive side, another student shared in his blog that the university chaplain did see a strong connection between yoga and faith practices in the Christian tradition. So there are many voices even amongst Baylor faculty on the topic.

There's plenty out there on the web to read about yoga and its apparent dangers, I'll get some links together in the future. It did motivate me to get off my writing butt...and get my own voice out there on the topic. So I'm going to start by applying for a faculty development grant to interview people on the topic.

I'm excited about teaching in San Marcos tonight. We'll do some standing poses and backbends and I think I'll talk about the first four sutras a bit.

The Spoon, The Pen and Karmic Embodiment

2011-09-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” Parker J. Palmer

By and large, I think this quote is true. At the same time, I spend a good deal of time teaching people techniques of teaching and I spend a good deal of time learning techniques of good teaching. I think the key to Parker Palmer's quote is that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique. He is not denying that good teachers use good technique.

I was thinking a lot about what makes for good teaching this weekend at the Swati Chanchani. Swati is an excellent teacher and she has excellent technique, but what is most inspiring about her is the essence of herself and how that has been purified through yoga. Simply being in her presence is a lesson in and of itself and I think that being in the presence of a good teacher is what Parker is getting at in the above quote.

A lot of Iyengar teacher training in the US gets reduced to technique and it is really inspiring to be taught outside of that context, though that TT context is hugely valuable and has definitely made me a better teacher of yoga.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I asked Swati what was most difficult for westerners to understand about yoga. She said karma. In brief, in the yogic world view, the point of it all is to become liberated from the ongoing cycle of life, death, rebirth, life and death. Swati spend a good deal of time explaining just how long this goes on. The concept of time involved is really pretty daunting in and of itself. I can imagine past lives, like say ten or so, but to imagine 100 or 1000 or 10,000...

Generally speaking, when people ask why do you want to escape the cycle of life, the answer is "all is suffering, sarvam duhkam." even when mostly pleasurable, life is tinged with sorrow (and the sutras tell us (2:15) the wise person, owing to the fluctuations, knows that even pleasurable experiences are tinged with pain and stays aloof from them. The next sutra, heyam dukham angatam follows. The pain that it yet to come can and should be avoided.... Ie. get off the wheel, figure out how to live in such a way that we don't generate further karma... ie practice yoga.

Swati had a slightly different answer about why you don't want another embodiment. She said it is limiting. Qua embodied beings we see separation. We see ourselves as different, we see the other as other. We judge. We discriminate, we make the world be what it is to us. To me, this is a more motivating reason than the all is suffering answer. The reason we do yoga is to overcome the limits of our current (and past, and infinitely past, and future experience). To be truly.... In Christina's recapitulation of Manorma's teachings, she wrote down a lot of aphorisms that speak to this same insight, but the one that gets best at what else I want to say is

Are you interested in being something or in Being itself?

If you are interested in Being, then I think you want to get off the wheel, because in karmic embodiment, you are always being something.

It is sort of like the moment in the Matrix movie when Neo goes to find out who he is, if he is the One. If he is something beyond his current understanding of himself, if he is in fact, being itself. As he waits to meet with the oracle, he watches children at play (as an aside, Heraclitus defined the activity of God as a child playing). One is playing with a spoon and bending it with his mind, or so it appears. Neo is perplexed and the child explains. You have to see that there is no spoon. Its the mind that moves.

Another great example of this same concept is in the book I'm teaching in Capstone. How Yoga Works. Simply put there is a student, the Captain, and a teacher, Miss Friday. They are discussing the nature of reality. They look at a pen. The captain says, this pen is a pen. My mind contributes nothing to the reality of the pen. She says. not so. To the cow, a pen, (in the sense of a writing tool) is not a pen. The cow doesn't perceive the pen as a pen and hence it is not for him. Now, true the pen, that keeps the cow in is perceived as a pen by the cow, probably, but that is not the direction the book goes.

though it should because really the extent of our perception is our own limitation. We are penned in by what the mind perceives and the minds ability to perceive is karmically determined. Yoga is the practice that allows us to get beyond these fences of the mind. To see there is no spoon, no pen, no limit.

Good fighting evil, one pose at a time.

2011-09-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

I'm really having a great time teaching this yoga and philosophy capstone. I just read the student blogs this morning. So many of them are attesting to yoga already at work in their lives. It is really pretty awe inspiring. Yoga both on and off the mat.

One of my favorite quotes came from Kelsey's blog about How Yoga Works and how the sutras relate to it. Short answer. In everyway possible. She goes onto compare some of the sutra sayings with some of the teachings of Jesus and she remarks that Yoga is Good fighting evil, one pose at a time.

I also had a great time teaching the Intro to Iyengar Yoga series down in San Marcos last time. 11 people ranging in age from college students to my mom and we were all there learning the poses. Some students started when Christina started teaching down there and it was nice to be part of that ongoing continuity of study. Others were brand new to yoga.

The highlight of my life, yoga and otherwise, since last I posted, was our trip to Dallas this weekend. We went up for the Swati Chanchani workshop. Swati is a long time student of BKS Iyengar. She and her husband have a yoga studio of their own in northern India. I would very much like to go there, some day soon I hope. The thing I like best about her is her energetic field. She is so sattvic. So calm and focused but with penetrating energy and insight. Her eyes just glow with compassion and understanding, insight, knowledge discernment. She asked if we had questions about yoga and I asked what is it that we westerners have the most difficulty understanding about yoga. She answered the whole cycle of life/ and rebirth. In a word karma. And it is central to the whole enterprise of yoga. it is why we do it.

More on that another time. She also emphasized the importance of not judging other people a great deal. We simply do not know what their circumstances are. So true.

I finished reading How Yoga Works. It is really a perfect way to introduce the Sutras. Swati herself said that you really can't sit down and read the sutras. They have to be taught to you. This book offers an example of how the yoga sutras are taught and in doing so teaches a bit about the sutras.

Here's the sequence from Week One at San Marcos School of Yoga.

Dandasana
Tadasana
Urdhva Hastasana
Urdhva Baddanguilasana
Paschima Baddanguilasana
Vrksasana
Adho Mukha Svanasana
Utthita Hasta Padasana
Parsva Utthita Hasta Padasana
Trikonasana
Prasarita Padotanasana
AMS
Dandasana
Marichyasana I
Concave Paschimottanasana
Chatushpadasana
Viparita karani
Savasana with legs crossed on bolster.

Anniversary Weekend

2011-09-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I had a lovely anniversary weekend. It's kind of nice that we got married labor day weekend, because we will always have a bit of a holiday to celebrate.

We did yoga together Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and a bit of Monday also. It is wonderful having the practice in common and wonderful to have someone help you put heavy weights on your body for restorative work. I've tweaked my shoulder a bit, but the weight therapy is definitely helping.

Last night, I taught at free day of Yoga down in San Marcos. the students were very attentive. A younger group than generally comes to Iyengar yoga in Austin. I felt like the BIC teaching prepared me for a younger audience.

In the capstone, we are reading How Yoga Works. In the story, the main character, Miss Friday, starts teaching one person, and then another and then those people start teaching people that they know. It was really fascinating reading the student blogs because several of them mentioned that they have been sharing yoga with people in their lives already.

It's how yoga works.

BIC capstone is fun

2011-09-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

I'm having a great time teaching the yoga and philosophy capstone. Really, it is the most fun I've had in the academic classroom in a long time and it is also more fun than teaching yoga in the typical yoga setting, the best of both worlds.

Partly what is fun about it in the academic context is doing yoga, with all the blankets and bolsters in a space so wholly not designed for it. I think it puts everyone in a different frame of mind and everyone has to participate to create the new space, by helping with the props and setting out their space. Also, there' a different level of participation that is required. In a regular philosophy class, I do a good job of getting people to participate but still everyone does tadasana in a yoga class and that level of involvement is at least on the superficial level universal. In a classroom discussion, everyone can be participating by listening or talking but not everyone can talk at once.

I was talking to Jeff about it last night and he said, "yes. It is easier to get everyone to do a pose, that it is to get everyone to think an idea."

It is more fun that the typical yoga class I teach for a variety of reasons. 1. Everyone is reading something common that I can draw upon. 2. There's a critical mass of people. 10-12 is way more fun to teach than 1-5. I don't feel the same level of pressure to make yoga interesting, I know I have the whole semester for things to unfold. Often in the yoga studio context, it is a one shot deal.

So we are reading How yoga Works but Michael Roache and Christie McNally. It is a "historical" novel about the yoga sutras in action. It is not the best novel, qua novel, that I've ever read, but it does do an excellent job of putting the sutras in an accessible context for people. We also have worked through the first 11 sutras, though really only 1-6 in any depth. I like having the regular philosophy discussion along side the discussion of the book.

it is also really great having Beth and Theresa in class as adult learners. It really presents a model of yoga as ongoing learning, which is a major aim of capstone.

Getting Ready for Week Two

2011-08-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

As far as academic weeks, go meeting wise/ etc... this one is pretty light. Which is good because I have a great deal of writing do to on the Sex and the City: Philosopher Queens paper. I've scheduled some pretty decent blocks of writing in every day this week. Lately, I've found that it helps me to listen to music when I write. It keeps me in the seat. Usually, I'm more of a total quiet kind of person, but the past three days, Pandora has done the trick.

In the yoga domain, I've been practicing a lot lately and also I've been finding time to get back to my afternoon inversion practice. Supported shoulderstand is great in hot weather. I've been feeling a lot of mental focus despite the fatigue that the heat kind of brings.

Students have not really done much with their blogs yet, they do get to miss a few, so I'm not fretting over it. I've enjoyed their insights about their beginnings of practice. Manouso Manos always said that it is important to keep on teaching beginners. I think that is true. Part of what is great about it, it keeps the freshness of learning very present at hand.

well, off to read a bit of How Yoga Works before bed. We discuss the first 16 chapters tomorrow. Interested to see how the students respond.

First weekend of class

2011-08-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I are relaxing on the couch, waiting for Kelly's graduation reception to begin. Actually, we are resting before we go over to help Mom and Dad with last minute preparations, then the party will begin at 6:30. Kelly, my brother-in-law, has just finished all his course work at Texas College for Traditional Chinese medicine. I've known Kelly for quite some time, I think since, 1993 or 1994. He picked me up at the airport in Bend, Oregon when I came up to visit Christina for Spring Break. They had just started dating at the time. At the time, he was planning to go back to school, I think at the University of Puget Sound. I remember that we had a nice conversation about the importance of education. Life events transpired in such a way that he didn't go then. He and Christina eventually got married, traveled around the US, settled in Prescott, opened the coffee shop and through all that Kelly always wanted to go back to school. I remember one late August, when we were visiting mom and dad in Lavonia. It was a gorgeous weekend, almost like fall and coming from Texas and Arizona respectively, it was lovely, almost like the break Jeff and I got in the weather for our wedding this time last year. The coffee shop was wearing on both of them and they were thinking about moving to New Mexico and Kelly was going to start the Great Books program at St. John's. I personally wasn't sure that was the path for him, but still it was really exciting seeing the energy toward education mounting. It seemed clear to me that one way or another, he was going to do it. Well, life events again transpired and then stuck with the coffee shop a little longer. About five years ago, they started talking about moving to Austin and living south of town and Kelly could commute to UT. I said, well if you are living that far south why don't you check out San Marcos so they did and that's where they moved. Not long after that Kelly found TCTM and the rest is history as they say.. I just gave you a bit of the history backstory.

Kelly's educational story reminds me a lot of the story that many people tell about their yoga journey, filled with stops and starts, but still something about the practice, something about the search, keeps pulling them toward it. Sooner or later that pull becomes strong enough that there is not a question of stopping.

He has a board exam left to take, but soon he will be done with this stage of his education. Of course, Acunpuncture, like philosophy, like yoga, is one of those "jobs" where the learning never ends. I think with career choices like that it is even more important to take a moment and officially bear witness to the importance of finishing some stage along the way. There's always more to do and that commitment to life long learning can blind us to what we have accomplished.

So, graduation ceremonies, whether they be formal or ad hoc, serve an important purpose. They mark the liminal space. The space between endings and new beginnings, this transformational space that can be scary because what we have known for a long time, our current status about ourselves and our life goal, is about to change. No longer will Kelly be someone who is trying to go to college. He is now someone who did. Happily, Liminal spaces, boundary lands are meant to be traversed, we do not exist in them forever. The work that it took to get us there is the best preparation for the road ahead, for the next stage of the journey and the opportunities and challenges it will bring.

I'm teaching this yoga capstone and it reminds me how great an idea a capstone class is. It is designed to give students a whole semester to reflect on where they have been and where they are going. It is really designed to help navigate the liminal space and what better tools than yoga and philosophy to help them on the journey.

The Legend of Bagger Vance

2011-08-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Last night Jeff and I watched the Legend of Bagger Vance. For those of you who have not seen it, it is basically a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, with Matt Damon as Arjuna (junah) and Will Smith as Krishna. I had seen the movie when it came out, but I think it was in a difficult time of my life and I really did not get all of the conceptual nuance of the film. It is very beautifully done.

While I am recommending golf movies, I will also put in a plug for A Gentleman's Game. Not quite the Gita retold, but both movies depict golf as the field of play on which we find/discover/determine our dharma, in both the sense of what is right action, but also in the sense of what is our plan for life.

And there's a delightful golf book called, Golf in the Kingdom, which is basically a retelling of the Symposium on the links of Scotland, including a lovely dinner at Agatha's house.

My favorite line from BV, golf/life is not a game to be won, but a game to be played. So often in life, we focus on winning to the detriment of playing. The goal is to play, to play well. In the Power of Myth series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, he refers to an Irish saying, "is this a private fight or can anyone join in?" I think we also see various forms of justice around us as a private fight and exempt ourselves from right action and playing/engagement with the field.

In all, I really enjoyed my first week of teaching the yoga capstone. I definitely feel less constrained than I do when teaching straight philosophy and less constrained than when I'm teaching yoga in a official yoga studio setting. Some of it is having the critical mass of people to make teaching fun and a lot of times I don't in my local yoga teaching events. I like the accountability of the academic class room.

in other teaching yoga and philosophy news,

My paper on Platonic Irony got accepted at SWPS, turns out that conference (in Austin) will be the same week George is in Austin. Actually, the last two years that conference has been pretty yoga intensive for me. Last year, it was in memphis and I met up with the Memphis folks to practice twice and attend class and the year before it was in Dallas on the same weekend as John Schumacher.

I'm working on the Sex in the City paper, which has almost nothing to do with yoga, though the girls do yoga in a few episodes, I am arguing it has something to do with philosophy, namely Platonic philosophy. Yesterday, I had a good day writing while listening to music in the background. I usually am more of the silent writing type, but the music really helped me focus and be still long enough to get 1700 words churned out. Going to try it again in a bout an hour, post blogging and dog walking and pre yoga.

I've taught a lot of yoga the past couple weeks, subbing at the Castle and for Devon and group practice.

I've also embarked on a weight loss regime and have lost ten pounds. This helps yoga more than philosophy and a healthier eating regime, cutting out most gluten, though not completely and the Omega juicer is great. I love the veggie juice gives me lots of energy and mental focus. Good for both yoga and philosophy.

Some thoughts from the first day of BIC yoga capstone

2011-08-24T03:45:00.000-07:00

Well, the first day of yoga capstone was pretty fun. Ten students are enrolled in the course. 1 male, 9 females. 3 adult co-workers also participated on the first day. My initial impression is that it is much more like teaching yoga than teaching a philosophy class. True, it was the first day and we mostly did introductions and asana, but I don't feel in the classroom in the same way. Actually, once we are in there, it feels like a totally different world. When I go back in the hall, I run into people who are wearing regular clothes and being barefoot and in a cute lulemon outfit, seems quite counter-cultural.

There's a range of flexibility even in 21 year olds. I was surprised how many students said it was difficult for them to be still and relax.

We worked on a few basic standing poses and in terms of philosophy mostly I worked with the idea of the bavana of various poses. What are the qualities of a mountain that we would like to have in our own life? that sort of thing.

There's a mother blog for the course where I am posting the sequences we do in class and suggested assignments. You can find it at bicyoga.blogspot.com

It is also fun having my regular academic life, meetings, dissertation proposal defenses and the like and then moving into the yoga world at the end of the day.

Here's the yoga and philosophy syllabus

2011-08-18T05:36:00.001-07:00

Hello Blog readers,

As some of you know, I am teaching a yoga and philosophy course this semester. It is a special topics senior capstone course for students in the BIC (Baylor Interdisciplinary Cores). I would teach the class a bit differently if it were a philosophy course (well, I would choose different readings, but memoir has long been part of the BIC capstone tradition and I thought that particular reading focus would work well in this context.

so here it is. Stay tuned as I plan to blog about the course along with the students. I'll post the course blog site soon.

BIC CAPSTONE EXAMINED LIFE III
Yoga Practice and Philosophy in Contemporary American Culture

Morrison 100
Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30- 4:45 PM.

Instructor: Anne-Marie Schultz, PhD
Certified Iyengar Yoga Instructor and director of the BIC.

“Now begins the practice of yoga.” Patanjali

“Practice. All is coming.” Pattabhi Jois

“My body is my temple. My asanas are my prayers.” B.K.S Iyengar

“When you want to be soothed, go to the Bhagavad Gita and drink it like nectar.” Patricia Walden.

Course Description: In this practice-based class, we will explore the various ways that traditional yoga philosophy and asana practice has become an important aspect of self-care for millions of Americans. As such, yoga provides a concrete model of the examined life. We will examine the benefits of this model over the course of the semester.

In each class, we will discuss yoga philosophy for 15-20 minutes and do a yoga asana practice 50-75 minutes. Sometimes, there will be distinct discussion time and asana time. Other times, I will talk a bit about the yoga philosophy during our asana practice.

A couple words about the asana part of class:

You will need to buy your own yoga mat and bring it to class each day. All other yoga props are provided for your use during class by the BIC. Please pick up a set of props in the BIC office suite (Morrison 101) and return them after each class.

For the asana practice, you will need to wear comfortable clothing. Shorts and a t-shirt are best. There are bathrooms for changing right next to the classroom. Please come to class prepared to practice yoga. You will need to take off your shoes as you enter the classroom as yoga is practiced barefoot.

Yoga is also best practiced on an empty stomach. Please do not eat right before class. Some juice or fruit is okay but if possible please eat lunch in the 11-1:00 range of time and try not to eat a heavy lunch that day. If you eat right before class, you will find asana more difficult to perform, it may even make you dizzy or nauseous.

There are some poses that we will practice that are not suitable for women on their menstrual cycle, if that is the case for you on any given day, let me know and I will give you alternate poses to do. Similarly, if you have particular physical injuries or other limitations that might hinder your ability to practice asana, please let me know and we can adapt poses to suit your particular needs.

I encourage you to find time to practice yoga when we are not in class. I will give you specific poses and breathing exercises (pranayama) to work with outside of class. There are also many books that give yoga sequences. Bear Aerobics offers yoga classes as to some health clubs around town. There is an excellent online yoga source, Yoga Glo, that lets you download many yoga classes for a small monthly fee. It is sort of a Netflix for yoga. All of these are excellent resources to explore as you establish your own daily yoga practice.

Also, there will be a few faculty members and other yoga practitioners joining us for the asana practices and one or two students auditing the course. Please welcome them to our classroom community.

A few words about the philosophy part of the course:

Over the course of the semester, we will read the Bhagavad Gita and a few of Patanjali’s famous aphorisms about yoga, from The Yoga Sutras. Michael Roach and Christie McNally’s, engaging novelistic account of the Sutras in action, How Yoga Works, will guide or discussion of this text. Our class discussion will focus primarily on the Sutras and the Gita, though we will also draw upon other readings. We will also read two memoirs by contemporary yogis and yoginis (male and female people who practice yoga). I have selected four memoirs. You should choose two of them to read and write about during the semester. The books are Waking, Yoga from the Inside Out, My Body is a Temple, and First There is a Mountain. (You can find a brief description of each book on line).

Just as I hope you will practice yoga outside of our classroom experience, I hope you will apply the insights you gain from reading these texts to your everyday life experience. Just as you get better at asana through practice, you get better at philosophy through practice.

Course Requirements:

BLOG 75%: Students will keep a semester long blog about this class: Please email me your blog address before the second class period so that I can list them all on a blog roll. Auditors and guests of the course, if you have a blog that you would like to have included on the blogroll, please email me that information (Anne_Marie_Schultz@baylor.edu).

The blog has five distinct elements each worth 15% of your grade (75% total):

1. A weekly reading reflection on the assigned readings. Sometimes I give you directed blog assignment about the readings. If there is no direct assignment, write about what aspects of the reading you found most inspiring or the aspects of the readings that you have questions about. These weekly entries are due by 8 am the morning of each Tuesday they are assigned. This will give me time to read them before class and shape our discussion around your particular responses to the reading. These daily posts should be between 150-250 words. There are 10 of these reading reflections assigned. You must complete 8 to be eligible to receive an A. You may complete all 10 reflections to supplement your grade in this section. Note: doing 8 does not guarantee that you get an A. The overall quality of the entries will determine the grade you earn for this section of the blog.

2. Four entries about the first memoir you have chosen to read. You may do these entries at any time but the first set memoir reflections are due by Oct 20. Each individual memoir reflection should be approximately 500 words. You may choose to do one long 2000-word entry for this book if you prefer that to the four short ones. The long entry is due by October 20.

3. Four entries about the second memoir you have chosen to write about. You may do these entries at anytime. Each individual memoir reflection should be approximately 500 words. The second set of reflections is due by Nov 22. You may choose to do one long 2000-word entry for this book if you prefer that to the four short ones. The long entry is due by November 22.

4. A weekly reflection about your experiences with asana practice in and out of class. These are due anytime after class on Thursday until Sunday at midnight they should reflect on the asana you practiced in and out of class during the preceding week. The weekly reflection should be between 250-500 words. There are 10 of these practice reflections assigned. You must complete 8 to be eligible to receive an A. You may complete all ten to supplement your grade in this section. Again, doing 8 does not guarantee that you receive an A. The overall quality of the entries determines your letter grade.

5. 2 comments per week on other student blogs or two responses to comments you receive on your own blog or 1 comment and 1 response per week. Due at your own discretion during the week. Over the course of the semester, you must comment or respond to a comment 25 times to receive an A. You may comment more than 25 times to supplement your grade in this section.

FINAL PAPER: Your final paper worth 20% will discuss how this capstone course draws to together a variety of elements of your BIC experience. The paper is due on the day of the final exam. Here is the assignment write a memoir about your BIC experiences. In the memoir include whatever biographical information about yourself that you think is relevant to answer the following questions. Your memoir may take any form you desire but in it, reflect on why you chose the BIC, why you chose to stay in the BIC, what you gained from your BIC experience, how it influenced your chosen course of study, how this course draws together other aspects of your BIC and college experience, what you gained from the course generally and suggestions about how both this course and the BIC might be improved in the future. The memoir should be between 15 and 20 pages. I encourage you to post it on your blog. Please turn in a copy to me in both digital and paper form as well.

Participation: The final 5% of the course is for class participation. Your participation grade includes attendance, attentiveness, active engagement with the class material and class process, respect for your peers, your professor, and most importantly yourself.

List of Required Readings:

1. How Yoga Works by Michael Roach and CHRISTIE MCNALLY. This historical novel will help you make sense of The Yoga Sutra’s of Patanjali. • ISBN-10: 0976546906
• ISBN-13: 978-0976546900

2. The Yoga Sutras are available on line in many places and there are many translations of it available on Amazon. Use whatever translation you like. I will primarily use B.K.S Iyengar’s translation and commentary (• ISBN-10: 8172235429 • ISBN-13: 978-8172235420) and Edwin Byrant’s translation and commentary (• ISBN-10: 0865477361 • ISBN-13: 978-0865477360 )

Here are a couple of online links. http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/yogasutr.htm http://www.kofibusia.com/yogasutras/index.php

3. Bhagavad Gita There are many translations of the Gita available. I will be teaching from the translation by Eknath Easwaran (ISBN-10: 1586380192 • ISBN-13: 978-1586380199) but you are welcome to use whatever translation you like.

4. Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar (• ISBN-10: 0805210318
• ISBN-13: 978-0805210316)
This book is often referred to as The Bible of yoga practice. It contains photos and detailed instructions about the asanas we will practice in class. I encourage you to read about each of the poses we study in class and refer to the book during your home practice time.

Pick Two of the Following.

Waking, Matthew Sanford. • ISBN-10: 159486845X • ISBN-13: 978-1594868450
Yoga from the Inside Out Christina Sell • ISBN-10: 1890772321 • ISBN-13: 978-1890772321
My Body Is a Temple Christina Sell. • ISBN-10: 1935387197 • ISBN-13: 978-1935387190
First There is a Mountain, Elizabeth Kadetsky ISBN-10: 0316890960

Schedule of Classes

Week One

Tuesday August 23
Reading Assignment: Start reading How Yoga Works Chapters 1-8.
Blog Assignment : Please introduce yourself to the blog world. Explain your previous experiences with yoga, why you chose to take this class, and what you hope to gain from the experience.
Class activity. An explanation of the course and our first yoga practice: Standing Poses.

Thursday August 25
Reading Assignment: Sutras 1-4 from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. You may find the Wikipedia site helpful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali
Blog Assignment: Write 1st practice reflection by Sunday.
Class Activity: Philosophy discussion and Class practice: Forward Bends

Week Two

Tuesday August 30
Reading Assignment #2 How Yoga Works 9-16
Blog Assignment: Write about your HYW readings thus far.
Class Practice: Backward bends.

Thursday Sept 1
Reading Assignment: The Five Vrttis: Yoga Sutras 1:5- 1:11
Blog Assignment: Write 2nd practice reflection by Sunday.
Class practice: Twists

Week Three

Tuesday Sept 6
Reading Assignment #3 HYW 17-24
Blog Assignment: write about your Yoga Sutra Readings thus far (1.1-1.11)
Class Practice: Emphasis on Standing Poses

Thursday Sept 8
Reading Assignment: Practice and Detachment YS 1.12-1.16
Blog Assignment: Write 3rd practice reflection by Sunday.
Class Practice: : Emphasis on Standing Poses

Week Four

Tuesday Sept 13 Reading Assignment #4 HYW 25-32
Blog Assignment: Write about how your HYW reading relates to your YS reading.
Class Practice: Emphasis on Forward Bends

Thursday Sept 15
Reading Assignment: The Kleshas II.1- II. 9
Blog Assignment: Write 4th practice reflection by Sunday.
Class Practice: Emphasis on Forward Bends

Week Five

Tuesday Sept 20
Reading Assignment: #5 HYW 33-40
Blog Assignment:
Class Practice: Emphasis on Backward Bends

Thursday Sept 22
Reading Assignment: The Kleshas and Karma: II.10- II.17
Blog Assignment: Write 5th practice reflection before Sunday.
Class Practice: Emphasis on Backward Bends

Week Six
Tuesday Sept 27
Reading Assignment HYW 41-48
Blog Assignment: Write about your overall impressions of HYW.
Class Practice: Getting Upside Down

Thursday Sept 29
Reading Assignment: The Eight Fold Path II.28-III.8
Blog Assignment Write 6th practice reflection before Sunday.
Class Practice: Pranayama.

Week Seven

Tuesday Oct 4
Reading Assignment: The Eight Fold Path II.28-III.8
Blog Assignment: Chose a limb of yoga to write about as it manifests in your life
Class Practice: Standing Poses

Thursday Oct 6
Reading Assignment: The Sutras on God: 1-.23-1.51
Blog Assignment: Write 7th practice reflection before Sunday.
Class Practice: Standing Poses

Week Eight

For the next two weeks, you do not have assigned reading blogs or practice blogs. You should use this time to complete your Memoir #1 assignments and begin reading The Bhagavad Gita.

Tuesday Oct 11 All Asana Day.
Class Practice: Forward Bends

Thursday Oct 13 All Asana Day
Class Practice: Forward Bends

Week Nine

Tuesday Oct 18 All Asana Day _ Backbends

Thursday Oct 20 Memoir #1 Assignments Due No CLASS

Week Ten

Tuesday Oct 25
Reading Assignment: BG chapters 1-6
Blog Assignment: Describe Arjuna’s dilemma and a similar experience in your own life.
Class Practice: Inversions

Thursday Oct 27
Reading Assignment: BG chapters 1-6
Blog Assignment: Write 8th practice reflection.
Class Practice: Pranayama

Week Eleven

Tuesday Nov 1
Reading Assignment: BG Chapters 7-12
Blog Assignment: What are three paths of yoga that Krishna describes? Which do you most resonate with?
Class Practice: Standing Poses

Thursday Nov 3
Reading Assignment: BG Chapters 7-12
Blog Assignment: Write 9th practice reflection by Sunday.
Class Practice: Standing Poses

Week Twelve

Tuesday Nov 8
Reading Assignment BG chapters 13-18
Blog Assignment: Write about how Krishna is portrayed in the Gita. How does he compare with your own understanding of divinity?
Class Practice: Forward Bends.

Thursday Nov 10
Reading Assignment BG Chapters 13-18.
Blog Assignment: Write Practice Reflection #10 by Sunday.
Class Practice: Forward Bends

Week Thirteen For the rest of the semester there are no daily blogs. Please use this time to work on your Memoir #2 assignments and begin writing your final papers.

Tuesday Nov 15 All Asana Day. No Daily Blogs
Class Practice: Backward Bends

Thursday Nov 17 No Class

Week Fourteen

Tuesday Nov 22 All Asana Day. No Daily Blogs.
All second memoir assignments are due before you leave for Thanksgiving Break.
Class Practice: Backward Bends

Thursday Nov 24 No Class – Thanksgiving Break

Week Fifteen

Tuesday Nov 29 All Asana Day. No daily blogs. Please work on your final paper
Class Practice: Inversions

Thursday Dec 1 All Asana Day. No daily blogs. Please work on your final papers.
Class Practice: Send me your favorite yoga pose and I’ll work them into a grand finale sequence.

Final Paper due on day of final exam.

The Acropolis Museum is sublime.

2011-06-24T11:56:00.001-07:00

Day Two and Three in Athens.

We’ve had a long couple of days in Athens. We arrived at the Hotel Stanley yesterday. The Hotel Stanley is near Omonia Square which is not the nicest part of town, nor is it the nicest hotel. However, the food was good last night and it does have a nice view of the Acropolis from the rooftop.

I do like to stay in nice hotels. It eases some of the stress of travel. I’m feeling a bit homesick, missing Austin, missing Milo, missing just been in my regular routine. I’m really glad Jeff is here with me. At least all those normal travel displacement feelings are not mixed in with missing him. Anyway, a month is a long time to be away from home.

That said, the trip to the Acropolis Museum has alone been worth the trip here. Wow. I first came to Greece almost 25 years ago. I think it was after my junior year. So yes, that would have been 1986. I lived in Athens for a semester at the beginning of 1992 and I came for a two-week faculty development trip I think in 2002 or 2003. It was before the Olympics at any rate. The Acropolis museum itself is a stunning building. It is built just below the Acropolis and it is built over the ongoing excavations of the ancient neighborhoods that surrounded it. You can walk right over the ruins and see the archaeologists doing restoration work before your eyes. The levels of the museum reflect the levels of inhabitation of the Acropolis. The top level has the internal continuous frieze in exactly the order and size (though not as high) and then the outer layer of triglyphs and metopes and of course the place for the pedimental sculptures. I really started crying when I saw how beautiful the space was and how much it illustrates the various destructions and vicissitudes of time and war that have been visited upon the building. I was also particularly moved by the second level that has the pedimental sculpture of the archaic temple, which was destroyed by the Persian attack, and they have places that show how the Athenians buried the sculptures that survived that attack.

On previous trips, I was always struck by how beautiful the art was but how dingy the various buildings that housed the art were. Now, no more.

The Acropolis experience itself really pales in comparison. I’ve been to the Acropolis and the various buildings on it many times before. While it is still magisterial, it is really the museum that illustrates its majesty over time. Plus when we went yesterday it was so hot and filled with cruise tours and special Olympians you really could hardly walk through the exit area without getting crushed. So from that low point, to the museum. That was wondrous.

We had a leisurely lunch in the Plaka and came home to rest and then the group went to dinner at a rather touristy place with live Greek dancing. Somewhere in the past few days, I’ve picked up a bit of a stomach bug so I’ve been dealing with that also.

Today, Jeff and I successfully found the laundry in Syntagma square and took some pictures of me in front of the University with the Socrates and Plato Statues and we had a coffee and juice in the café of Schliemann’s old house. Now are back in the room. I’m going to do a bit of yoga before we head back out to pick up our clothes.

Then, we take off to Sunion this afternoon. One of my favorite temples. Great setting and a great story.

Heading to Athens

2011-06-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I had a nice day in the old town of Rhodes. We met up with the group and went to the Grand Master's place which had two very informative exhbits about medieval Rhodes and ancient Rhodes. Then we took a break from the heat and ate lunch. We also visited the Archeological Museum which was fabulous, though we were pretty hot by then. The building itself is stunning and they have an amazing collection of ancient and hellenistic sculpture.

I met briefly with the students where we discussed the following questions

> 1. Having observed all of these Roman sites, how has your perception of the Roman Empire itself changed?
>
> 2. What do you think Emperor worship would have been like?
>
> 3. What do you think it would have been like to be a Christian in this context?
>
> 4. Compare this experience with the Contemporary Christian experience at Baylor/ with American Culture more generally.
>
> 5. at least one of you were skeptical about Mary actually living in Mary house, you ranged in opinions about whether Homer's account really occurred at Troy. What mechanisms do you use for sorting out what you believe about past events?
>
> 6. Based on what you have seen thus far, what do you think is most lacking in your overall education?
>
> 7. What could the BIC do to enhance its regular course offerings so that students were best prepared for this sort of experience?

time to go.

more later.

Getting Ready to head out to the Grand Master's Palace

2011-06-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Well, we made it to Greece. We left our hotel in Marmaris around 7:45 and drove to the ferry. We took the boat over and landed in Rhodes. We had a local tour guide that took us on a very abbreviated driving tour of the city. It was quite frustrating for all of us after all the care that Cenk showed to our group throughout the trip. We were just run of the mill tourists here. Also there was some mix up about our pre payment for the Palace, so we did not go.

Jeff and I are going back today.

Despite the less that stellar tour experience, we did get a couple hours of free time to roam about the Old Town part of the city. Jeff is in mourning about not having Turkish food. I've sort of prepared him for the worst with respect to the blandness of greek food. He is now carrying with him a packet of Turkish spices. That said, we did find a place for lunch that had good dolmas, potato spread and eggplant spread, but the rest of the mezes left something to be desired. After that we walked up toward the mosque and found a place with a panoramic view and later found a cafe with wireless.

We met up with the group and headed to the hotel. The hotel too is not so great, in terms of setting and amenities, but it is very clean and had a nice floor for yoga practice and room for us both to do it more or less at the same time.

but we did walk up to the roof to look at both sunset and sunrise. We can see the Apollo temple from the roof as well, so that was a pretty cool thing to do on the even of the summer solstice.

All the above griping aside, the Old Town of Rhodes is pretty impressive. Everywhere you look, there's something stunning to see. The presence of the Knights of St. John's quite inspiring and it offers a glimpse of Europe before it was the Europe that we know. I'm looking forward to walking around some more, going to the Palace and perhaps the archeaological museum and maybe even a trip back up to the temple. City bus number 5 apparently goes there.

Marmaris

2011-06-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

Marmaris has exceeded my expectations. The guide books say it is mostly a tourist port town, kind of like Fort Lauderdale or Key West in someways, but it is filled with Australians and Brits and Germans not many Americans. It is indeed that, but it is much more beautiful than Kusdasi and doesn't have tons of cruise ships and once you get beyond the strip and the bazzar it is pretty quiet and peaceful. Last night Jeff and I went to the Panorama Bar, recommended in Lonely Planet. The owner has a telescope that he very adeptly focuses for his customers to see the moon. You could even see the craters on the moon. Walking in that village area just past the marina reminds me a lot of various Greek towns, it very much feels like a transition to Greece sort of place.

Today, we slept in a bit, did some yoga and then headed out to explore a bit. We walked until there wasn't anymore shade and then hopped in a cab to the market area.
Jeff and I walked until people stopped getting us to buy stuff and walked a bit further and found a fabuolous place for lunch, I had a great salad and mezes and Jeff had our best pide yet. All that and Turkish Coffee and Chai for 20 lira (including tip). Our meal at a local doner kabob place across the street yesterday was also plenty tasty.

it also turns out that our hotel has a wine store specializing in Turkish wines. How perfect.

It is also clear that you can get to much more isolated areas from here pretty easily. Anyway, it has been a nice end to the Turkey experience and the hotel is about the best on the trip as well.

Right now we are getting ready to walk down to the beach for an hour or so.

Jeff did some laundry and I tried to consolidate our bags a bit. So far we have not broken out the extra duffle bag.

Tonight is the last night in Turkey dinner and we leave on the Ferry to Rhodes in the morning.

Yesterday's post On the Road to Marmaris.

Today is a travel day. We are about 1/3 of the way through a 4.5-hour trip to Marmaris where we will catch the ferry to Rhodes and then fly from Rhodes to Athens. There is not too much going on sight seeing wise, mostly we are just making the trip southward to get the ferry and to save on costs of getting to Greece. It is a bit of down time for everyone also. Things will be pretty non-stop once we get to Greece. Part of me is really looking forward to seeing Greece again and I’m particularly excited for Jeff to see some of the Greek sites, but I really like Turkey so much that another part of me is sad to be leaving it.

Hopefully, the Marmaris hotel will have decent Internet service and we can get some pictures posted. I guess posting pictures on Facebook is the current equivalent of sending postcards back in the day. It really is amazing how much technology has taken root in our lives just in the past 5 years, Five years ago there was no Facebook, iphones were just getting started, no I pads, I don’t even think I brought my laptop on the last trip to Greece. There was no expectation that hotels would have Internet service. I went to an Internet café once or twice to check email, but was really pretty glad for the break from it.

When I came 1992, calling home meant finding a phone book that made international calls and I wrote letters and postcards and people even wrote back over the semester I was there. Mail was a big deal. Sort of like mail in summer camp. Photos were not digital yet and so we were constantly on the lookout for batteries and film it was really expensive to get photos developed over here but sometimes we went ahead and did it.

I do think the attempt to capture the travel experience visually and in writing is nothing new. Think way back to Pausanias travelling through the Greek world and writing his descriptions of various temples in the early years of the Roman Empire.

Oran Pamuk has copies of numerous illustrations from the 1800’s of Istanbul and the detail of those illustrations is breath taking. We’ve seen several of the originals in various museums around and about.

So we just have different modes at our disposal now. Travel broadens the horizons of experience and something in that broadening does seem to compel us to share it with others. A small example of what compels the philosopher to go back into the cave. The philosopher is like any traveler leaving the comforts of home, of the cave, the philosopher/traveler sees what there is to see and that reorienting insight has at least two phenomenological aspects to it. Socrates speaks of the philosopher’s desire to stay there, much like I felt on Assos, I could just stay there forever, but there’s also something in the transforming experience itself that makes reach back toward those we know are elsewhere. We want to share what we see with those we love.

Well, it is time for our coffee/chai/portakal suyu break.

More later.

A Long post about the last few days.

2011-06-17T08:56:00.001-07:00

This post is long. I finally had time to get online and update it. it is written over the past three days.

Today was our Free Day in Kusadsi. Jeff and I slept in, ate breakfast, did yoga, went to a Turkish bath, walked out to bird island where there is a former Turkish Prison, walked back in the sweltering heat, took a shower to regain our clean feeling from the Turkish bath and are taking turns getting on line. This hotel is ridiculous in that only one person per room can be on line at a time and if someone else gets on, it kicks the other person off. Anyway, in all a mellow day, though the walk back in the sun with the cruise ship debarkers was a low point.

Thursday Night After Dinner.

Here’s a funny travel story. Jeff and I were coming up on the elevator yesterday right after we checked in and an older Indian (like from India Indian) couple got on the elevator with us. They were also on the elevator on the way down to dinner as they are staying on our floor and we saw them again on the elevator on the way up from breakfast this morning. Jeff and I were discussing where they might be from, if they were perhaps from England travelling in that they said “good morning” quite readily, but there were enough Indians around that I thought perhaps, though it seemed strange, that there was an Indian touring group. I told Jeff, if so, they would, of course, speak English well.

Anyway, they were on the elevator again this evening as we were going down to Happy Hour (happy hour at this hotel by the way is only a happy 45 minutes and really 40 in that it stops 5 minutes early… but that aside).

The Indian gentleman says, “Which country are you from?”

“America.”

“Do you have lots of Patel’s where you are from?”

I thought immediately of Ramanand Patel, yoga teacher extra-ordinare. But answered, “Yes many in Houston.”

“Oh is Houston where you are from?”

“no. We live in Austin not far from there. Jeff’s family lives in Houston.”

“Where are you from?”

They answer and she clarifies, “near Bombay.”

She continues, “we see you only in the elevator.”

I, trying to be friendly, “oh I went to Pune to study Yoga.”

Keep in mind that Jeff happens to be wearing a BKS Iyengar t-shirt from Dean Lerner’s studio that shows BKS doing Adho Muhka Svanasana…..

The gentleman says, rather fiercely, “No. there is no yoga only YOG. I pronounce it again, trying to say the G stronger, but still leaving the A and he again says “no. It is only YOG.”

We continue out the elevator and he explains,

That the A on the end of the word is because the English people could not say YOG just like they could not say Ram so they made it “Rama.” I am thinking to myself that yes, I knew that and that also I’ve at some point heard the argument about whether it is asan or asana and remembered too when the Iyengars really get going the A on the end gets lost, like think in the jumpings,… and some teachers make a big deal out of saying Trikonasan….

So I nod in agreement. You people is clear the subtext here.

“do you know what yog means?” he asks…

“Well,” sensing a trick question here, “Many people say it means Union, but I also am told it does not really mean that.”

“No. it does not. Yog means the totality. The whole.”

“that is nice I said.” I also thought that makes sense. Union is the mechanism to the totality but I can see why people think Union is the end rather than the means, but more on that another time..

There is a pause, albeit brief….

“Do you meditate?” I am suddenly feeling like I’m one of Socrates’ interlocutors…

I said, “yes. I try.”

“How do you do it?

I’m like, what do you mean how do I do it? “well, um I sit and try to be still.”

“How do you sit?”

“what do you mean how do I sit?”

“Do you sit with the legs crossed ?” and he makes a padmasan like gesture with his arms

I said, “well, I try, but that pose is hard for me, so I also sit in Sukasana, and virasana and siddasana.” I think I kept the As on the end, but he nodded…

“And do you keep your hands on your knees with your palms up?” making the seal between the thumb and the first finger?”

And I said, “ Well yes. But also I have to put my hands on something because my torso is so long if I bring my hands to my knees then I can’t sit up straight”

He said, “it does not matter, the hands can be anywhere on the legs… It does not have to be a 33.3 degree angle.”

At this point, Jeff and his wife are talking, perhaps about Jeff’s shirt.

And we part ways, us to the bar them for a walk and he says, “we will talk more tomorrow.”

Jeff says that he said Namaste with the gesturing I had thanked him for teaching me. Though I did not see the gesture, like Euthyphro, eager to get away…

We saw them after dinner and I smiled and said “YOG.”

His wife said, “ Good teacher and good student.”

Thursday June 16th Late Afternoon

We are on the bus, heading back toward Kudasi. Another long day, filled with all sorts of pedagogically enriching experiences. Cenk started the day off, with what he termed, “an emergency stop.” Lo and behold, a Starbucks in a small outlet mall appeared before us. I have a love/hate relationship with Starbucks. I try not to go if there’s a local option, but often I’m really super happy to see one. I have to say my iced espresso was great! Though I did have to explain the over ice concept, apparently espresso is definitely hot in Turkey, an iced Americano was fine, but not the iced espresso, but I managed to convey, hayir su, (no water) to the person making the drink.

After Starbucks, Cenk explained a bit about which American chains have been more successful in Turkey. For example, Burger King, has overall been more successful than McDonalds because they offered Turkish beverages, like Aryan, the yogurt drink, along with the Americanized options. Starbucks followed this model and does have Turkish coffee on its menu, though Cenk admitted most people don’t get Turkish coffee at Starbucks, it is still good marketing that they have it on the menu.

About a half an hour later, we started driving through the Meander valley. We passed over the Meander River and Cenk explained to us where the original coastline was. It is really amazing how much the land has changed. In the time of Thales (580 bce) Miletus was a harbor town. Now it is 18 km inland. This change in landscape shows the truth of Thales’ insight about water as well. The river of the Meander conquered the sea. We sat for a long time in the Roman theatre of Miletus. Part of it is built over the original Greek theatre, but there were not much of the Greek ruins to see. Cenk pointed out where the original harbor was. Where once there were ships, now there are tour busses. Not too many thankfully. Still, it was really inspiring to be sitting and walking around on the same bit of land that Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes all walked on. It does not have the same feeling of sacred space that many of the temples still do, but then again, these philosophers were offering a different way of looking at the world, so perhaps not surprising that the remnants of their various ethoi feel different in my imagination. The ruins of the Roman Bath, dedicated to Marcus Aurelias’ wife Faustina, were another fascinating aspect of the site, as were the litter of puppies meandering about. I am slightly worried about an outbreak of ringworm amongst the group due to the fact that many of the students seem to have no qualms about touching the various dogs and cats meandering about the meander valley. I’ll just call up Hygenia for a bit of help.

After Miletos, we headed toward the Apollo temple at Didyma. That is one amazing temple structure. The columns are immense and the overall structure of the temple very apparent. The Apollo temple was slightly smaller than the Artemis temple in Izmir, and hence missed out on being one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but a column or two… but today it is in much better repair. Didyma was not a city itself at the time; rather it was the sacred space of Miletus. We had a lovely lunch at a café there and then drove up the mountain to Priene, where we saw a Greek era theatre in excellent shape, so excellent that the Roman’s did not do much to change it, and the stunning temple to Athena. The setting of it reminds me a bit of Delphi though the mountains and valleys not quite as immense in scope. You can see the island of Samos, about an hour and a half boat ride away from the top of the temple area along with the town of Miletos. Back in the day, it would have also been on the sea, but now the Meander silt has covered up the sea. By the way, Samos is the birthplace of Pythagoras. So many of the early philosophers, Xenophon, Heraclitus, were from this general area. It does make me wonder about that philosophical spirit, is it something about being closer to the water and closer to the trade and the influx of different ideas that makes people begin to think differently, the very tangible awareness that the world around us is constantly in flux, Panta Rei, Everything changes, Everything flows, according to Heraclitus. Even today, Izmir is a liberal city in Turkey, does something of that philosophical spirit of the Milesians reside there.

It was the mellowest of the intense touring days. Everyone is a bit tired and ready for a bit of a break.

We’ve gotten some clues about how to get the Internet to work so hopefully I’ll be able to post this and various pictures over the next couple of free days.

Oh also worthy of note about Priene, though our tour guide did not mention it. They found inscriptions on the site that talk about Augustus in 29 ce in terms that are very similar to words used to describe Jesus, a savior, one who brings “good tidings because of his coming. This trip has made me appreciate Emperor worship more deeply. I think I’ve always been a bit skeptical about it, like did they really believe Emperors were divine, didn’t they just see that for the political power play that it so clearly was. … But, just as being around the temples to the Greek deities makes me realize that the Greeks “really” believed in these gods, I have gotten a much deeper sense of how it would have been quite difficult to not to see Emperor worship in similar terms. Also, as a result, a greater appreciation for what the early Christians were up against. They really were offering a profoundly different understanding of the divine human relationship, one at the time that was probably as philosophically different than what the Milesians themselves developed.

It is a little difficult to tell how all this is striking the students. It makes me realize how much I depend on journals and blogs to get inside their minds. From the outside, their responses range from avid note taking and drawing of temple structures to ongoing discussion about Disney movies and elaborate photo ops. (not that I haven’t done my share of photos), but over the years I really have learned a lot about what I’m seeing here and so many pieces of knowledge are coming together. I’m thinking back about my first study abroad encounter. Partly because I went with a group of classics students from Penn who knew all this stuff about what we were seeing, and I had spent three weeks of class playing catch up on classical terminology, I felt awed by how much there was to learn. I also remember being interested in getting a tan and renting paddle boats to ride in the waters of the Aegean.

Thursday Morning June 16th

Yesterday offered another action packed day. I’m writing now just before leaving for the third action packed day of touring before getting pretty much three full days off. It is hard work this study abroad experience.

So yesterday was Wednesday, we left Pamukkale at 8:00 and drove a couple hours back toward Ephesus. We stopped for our morning chai/bathroom break. Jeff and I split a fabulous orange juice and then Jeff walked down the road where he saw a local man picking peaches. It was the juiciest peach. I’ve eaten. Not the most flavorful but definitely the juiciest. Jeff caught it on film and there are distinct juice drops falling to the floor.

Our first stop in Ephesus, the Virgin May house. This is reported to be the place where John and Mary lived. There is some evidence that a dwelling was there in the early 1st century but truthfully the most compelling evidence to me is how the site was discovered. A nun in Germany had a vision of Mary at this place that she had never been to, but it appeared in her dreams and people found the site based on the descriptions in her dreams. The Pope authenticated the site, I think in the 60’s and it has been a Catholic and Muslim place of pilgrimage for some time. It was interesting observing the student and faculty skepticism about the reality of it. We’ll talk about that issue in class tomorrow. For the record, I don’t believe that Mary actually lived here either but I don’t find belief in that “fact” much different than other “facts” that faith asks one to believe.

It is a lovely peaceful space regardless. After Mary, we visited the site where John is supposed to be buried. My favorite thing about this site is looking down from it and seeing the one resurrected column of the Artemis temple below. Over and over again civilizations build their holy places on top of each other. There are remains of a 4th century church on the same site and then Justinian built a larger grander church to honor John’s burial there and so what is on the site now are the remains of a lovely Byzantine Church with a clear cross structure. There’s even a mosque just below, which has the word Jesus in its title.

I would say this trip thus far has been rather challenging to my own views about the possibility of a majority of people ever adopting a universalistic stance with respect to world religions. Normally, I am pretty comfortable with the notion that different religions just have different ways of talking about the divine and why we believe one or another is really much as John Stuart Mill suggests it is, a matter of location. However, here you see such a blatant expression of here’s one perspective, be that Emperor worship, Artemis worship, Christian worship being the best perspective, the only perspective and they stand in stark juxtaposition. The emperor temple has to be taller than the Greek temple, the mosaics are covered over. Christians destroyed Roman statues and put Crosses on them, it makes me despair about really coming to any settled universalistic stance at least in so far as large groups of people can come together and live in peace. So much of what believers believe puts them in direct conflict with what other believers believe.

We stopped at the carpet place for a lovely lunch. The carpets are so beautiful even though Jeff and I are not in the market for one right now, I still almost convinced myself that our very small hallway needed one. Maybe next year. The food was fabulous and also free. Our tour guide brought us there last year as well, though the food was better than I remembered.

In the late afternoon, we headed to Ephesus. The gods were definitely smiling on us for we practically had the site of Ephesus to ourselves. Beyond that, a rainstorm threatened the whole time but did not materialize but it dropped the temperature a good twenty degrees. Last year, when Jeff and I were here it was so, so, so, so hot and so, so, so crowded. It was absolutely delightful to experience the wonders of the site in comfort.

Another highlight of the trip: the Grotto of Paul. We got permission to visit the Cave of Paul and Thecla. Thecla was an early convert to Christianity, so the story goes, and the story of their relationship captivated early Christians and Christians for many centuries thereafter. Anyway, we met up with a professor of NT studies at Biola and his wife and then walked up past the work going on excavating the terrace houses and met a Turkish Archaeologist and his Austrian assistant who led us up the rough steep upward way to this cave that is filled with wall paintings of various figures of the Bible ranging from Abraham and David to the various disciples to Paul and Thecla. The cave dates back to I think the 6th century will need to check on that date. It reminded me a lot of the various caves of Cappadocia. Also, fascinating, Christians used the space for worship as late as the 1800’s. We took some great photos, though the Turkish Archaeologist asked us not to publish them, I’m not sure if Facebook is the kind of publishing he meant… but he did say it was okay to use them privately.

I was also awed by the fact that he worked on this site for 41 years. His love for his work was so clearly evident on his face and in his willingness to show us the site and his desire for us to ask questions. He walked well, but with the help of a cane and his assistant used the cane to give him leverage to pull himself up the hill. It was just starting to rain as we headed up and continued to hold off until we finished the site.

After the cave, we spent some time walking around the library and the theatre. Cenk mentioned that scholars now think that Paul never really spoke in that area, that the rebellions against him were so successful that he did not speak publically. Cenk also pointed out the Christian graffito symbols around the entryway. It is the ichthus (letters of the word, fish in Greek) all written inside a circle, and it ends up looking like a pinwheel. So a long rich day. We went to Kudasi, checked into the hotel, which is supposed to have Internet service, but so far Jeff and I have not been very successful getting it to work. We took a quick swim in the pool, ate dinner and did a bunch of laundry. It is nice to been in one hotel for a few nights and it is very large with plenty of room for yoga which we will have time to do for the next two days. Oh, another highlight of yesterday, the strawberries at dinner. We’ve seen several strawberry vendors on the sides of the road but this was my first opportunity to eat them. Wow. The best strawberries ever, they had so much strawberry flavor that they almost tasted like fake strawberry flavor. YUMMY. The land in this area is very fertile; several rivers flow through the area and the land is just filled with lovely things to eat…. Cenk mentioned that this area provided food for a lot of the Roman Empire. I can see why. Anyway, enough for now. I’m getting carsick, typing on the bus. Not far from Miletus now.

Wednesday June 15th

We are in the bus on the way back to the Aegean coast after a day’s journey inland. What a day! We left Izmir around 8 AM and drove about 2.5 hours to Aphrodisia. . Aphrodisia is an amazing site. It was “discovered’ in modern times about sixty years ago. A famous photographer was travelling about and saw various local people using carved marble pieces and sitting on marble benches and he took a bunch of fascinating photos, I think found the original site and then sent the photos to an archeology friend who realized what the site was and spent his life excavating the site. It has an amazing temple to Aphrodite and a lovely Bouleterion and a very large stadium. Jeff and I took a few warm up yoga poses there (just prepping ourselves for a bit later in the day). The museum also has a stunning site of frieze sculptures many depicting stories of Aphrodite and a few of Aeneas leaving Troy.

After that, we stopped at a lovely local restaurant for a lunch of salad and pide. This place grew everything in the garden surrounding it and the freshness of the herbs and peppers and pomegranate vinegars and olive oils were bursting with freshness.

After lunch, we drove another hour or so and ended up at the site, Laodicea. Paul mentions Laodicea in his writings. He warns them against being lukewarm in fact. I did not know this, but he was drawing on a reference to the hot and cold waters that ran through the city from the near by mountains. Laodicea was fascinating for another set of reasons in that it is a site that is under ongoing reconstruction. We got to see how archeologists do their constructing work. There were cranes and various other heavy machines. Scott visited for the first time in 2006 and said there was almost nothing visible. It is pretty inspiring to see people dedicating their lives to this sort of work. It was getting pretty hot so we did not stay long. We sat in the unexcavated stadium for a while and looked upward to the city of Hierapolis and the calcium pools of Palmukkale. Our next stop. All of these cities are situated around the Meander valley, named after the Meander River, where we get our word “meander” from, as the Meander meanders about and ends up eventually in Miletus where we will visit tomorrow.

It was getting rather late in the day by the time we hit Hierapolis, but we trudge up the hill to the Roman Stadium and the few was pretty stunning. Hierapolis has some well-constructed areas but is also still under active construction. But it also is clearly a sort of spa vacation destination too. There is an antique pool there where you can swim amongst columns of various sorts for about 20 dollars a person. I would like to do that sometime, but it wasn’t on yesterday’s agenda. Instead, we went to soak our feet in this stunning travertine pools. They are made out of some sort of calcium deposits that look like snow from a distance, there are a series of pools on top of each other and you can walk through them and look down into the valley. Jeff and I took turns doing various yoga poses. The pools are a bit slippery and it is a bit dizziness inducing doing some poses. We have some great pictures and it was tons of fun. A great day to end a really great day.

Seeing all three of these cities is such close proximity to each other and seeing their grandeur and knowing how far they are from Rome gave me a much greater appreciation for just how far the power of the Roman Empire extended. These were no small military outposts but fully flourishing cities, quite the happening place to be back in the early centuries AD.

Our hotel, the Lycos River, was filled with European and Japanese tour groups. This has been our first substantive encounter with hordes of other tourists. We have been very fortunate thus far. We were almost the only group in our Assos hotel and the hotels in Izmir and Istanbul were both relatively small so there was not the mass of humanity factor present. It had my usual food disinterest after seeing that many people descending upon a buffet, so I didn’t eat much other than a fresh gozleme that I saw two Turkish women were preparing before my very eyes.

After dinner, Jeff and I soaked in the hot thermal baths for an hour or so. By then it was almost ten at night, so it was not all that crowded. 6 hours later, we were up fighting the early wave of breakfast eating hoards. I opted for café and some dried fruit.

We packed up and are on way back to the coast where we will hit the major sites associated with Ephesus, Saint Mary’s house, St. John’s Basilica, a carpet school, the Ephesus museum and the sight of Ephesus itself. We might also being doing the cave of Paul and Thecla today, I’m not sure.

On the way, we stopped at a truck stop, shared a wonderful portakala (fresh orange juice) and Jeff bought us five peaches that had just been picked off the trees. YUMMY.

The Day in Izmir

2011-06-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

Izmir seems to be the Austin of Turkey. Politically, it is more liberal, people seem to like to hang out in cool venues.. less Islamic dress... Anyway, it somehow seems less foreign than Istanbul.

I met with the BIC students this morning. They seem right on target with what they are "supposed" to be getting from the experience. I think a lot of study abroad is simply being reflective about the experience of being there, but I also think that's the overall point of philosophical education.. getting people to be reflective about being there.

After the morning meeting, Jeff and I headed to the Izmir market place. We had observed where it was during our tour of Izmir last year. I really liked this market. It seemed much less touristy much less overblown that either the Spice market or the Grand Bazzar in Istanbul. We had a great time checking out the copper works and had a nice lunch down there as well. I was also impressed that I managed to navigate us back to our hotel.

I did a bit of yoga in the afternoon while Jeff caught up on the electronic world and then we went out to dinner with the other faculty and Levant, Cenk, and Erin of Tutku Tours.. Seriously,,, if you ever want to travel in Turkey, contact them. They are great!.

Then we came back to the hotel and are backing for three super packed days. Our next free day is Friday. As I was repacking for the fourth time in a week, I remembered why Alice Baird likes cruises. You only have to unpack once. There's something to that. Actually, I was able to consolidate a lot and those vacuum sealed backs really work. Way better than the Eagle pouches in terms of space saving. All this is good news for purchasing more spices, olive oil, et al.

I'm tired off to bed for 6.5 hours or so. Jet lag is still a very real struggle.

From Istanbul to Izmir

2011-06-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Well, we are here in Izmir after a transcendent afternoon and evening in Assos, the highlight of the trip thus far for me. The internet service has been pretty sporadic, so I need to just write posts as I go along and post them when I can. I’m posting the photos to facebook, so you can go there for the visuals.

Let’s see we left Istanbul quite early Saturday morning. Got some amazing pictures of The Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia in the early morning light. My favorite part of Istanbul was probably the view from our hotel balcony of those two magnificent structures. I found myself a bit sad to be leaving such a historic place but there is so much more ahead.

We drove for a while and took a ferry ride across at Gallipoli from the European side to the Asian side of Turkey. When my sister and I were growing up, we used to play this silly car game that went, we are , we are we are we are in…… Georgia, or North Carolina or Texas or Canada or even the next town port chester whenever we crossed a border. So Jeff played the we are we are we are in Asia game with me…

It is quite cool to step off of one continent and be in another in a thirty minute boat ride. We didn’t see much of the Gallipoli sight except the what we passed in the car. Jeff and I watched a couple movies about it preparation for the trip. Despite the horrors of the battle, it is pretty inspiring that Ataturk constructed a monument to the mothers of the lost soldiers saying in effect, they rest with us as family now.

Then we headed to Troy. I was excited to see Troy even though I remain skeptical that this is actually where the Homer battles took place. It was pretty neat seeing the history of the excavations and imagining a lot of what ifs… what if that is the plain where Hector’s body was dragged around by Achilles and that sort of thing.

From there, we headed to Assos. Assos is my new favorite place in the world. It is just totally stunning. There’s an amazing Athena temple. You have a great view of the island of Lesbos and Miltelene is not far off. Aristotle lived there for a couple of years after Plato died. Turkey is fabulous for many reasons, but one of them is that they actually let you get right up on the temples and touch them, walk around on them. Our hotel in Assos had the best hotel food of the trip, at least for dinner.

We left around 9:00 drove to Pergamon and saw the Ascepleion first. It was perhaps even more fascinating the second time around. We got to spend more time there. I also had just heard a talk on Galen and his work with animal dissection at the Tampa Philosophy Conference so I had a greater appreciation for his work than I did last year. The holstic approach to medicine continues to impress me as well. Then a great lunch, what’s not to like about a baked cheese dish… and a lovely salad.

Then off to the Acropolis. Cenk pointed out different things than our previous tour guide and I just felt like I had a better grasp of the overall structure on the second visit, so despite the fact that the owl did not choose to visit us again (though I do think I saw one while we were at the theatre… ) it was great… also great that it was not 110 degrees.

We also got to stop at the Red Basilica for awhile which we did not get to stop at last time. It is another one of those sites that was originally an Isis temple, then a Christian Basilica, then a mosque… The over lay of religion upon religion is so fascinating to me for all sorts of reasons. While we were on top of the Acropolis, where the temple of Trajan was erected, there’s yet another example. The Temple to the Emperor of Rome is built even higher up than the altar to Zeus. Who needs a triumphal arch when you can have a whole triumphal temple…

Now we are in Izmir. Tomorrow is a free day, so I’ll write some more and get some much needed yoga in.

My post from the group blog

2011-06-09T23:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I have to say that the shared blog idea is so far striking me as a very cool pedagogical concept. I do like the idea that each student has their individual blog that feeds into this blog also, but I really like reading the different perspectives and voices that are present on the single page.

Last night is the first night since leaving that I actually managed to get seven hours of straight sleep so I'm feeling a bit more perky. The students have described a lot of the ins and outs of what we saw. I thought I'd add a few of my own reflections.

Upon arriving at the Blue Mosque, I realized that here I am 45 years old, and I've never actually been inside a mosque before. I left the faculty of world II before world II started taking the mosque trip and on my various travels, I've never been to one. . I sort of felt embarrassed that I had not had the experience, culturally limited in some way. I have been to Hindu temples and synagogues but not a mosque. Well, as a first experience it was pretty stellar. There is something quite spiritually compelling about the lack of images. There's a similar visual awe that things like the mosaics depict, but also something that does along the visual to turn inward a bit more. Or at least I imagine that would be the overall spiritual effect over time. We did take our shoes off, but we carried them through with a plastic sack, unlike the Hindu temple experience where you simply leave the shoes outside. Just those minor cross cultural similarities always strike me as fascinating.

The calls to prayer here occur five times a day, striking for a secular country. Cenk talked one night at dinner about the various political parties in Turkey and apparently, the secular status of Turkey is rather a matter of great debate. Some parties want to change the consistution so that it is not secular. One thing we learned that manifested itself immediately at Hagia Sophia was that when Ataturk declared Turkey Secular, the Christians said, "ok, great," let's let Hagia Sophia be a Christian space again... and so some restoration began. It is really quite striking to see the Christian imagery with the Islamic circles depicted the name of god and the names of the prophets in one place. It isn't quite a symbol of universalism but it does at least speak to the contested nature of how humans understand the divine and it is at least one solution. Rather than destroy each other, let's let the different perspectives have their space. I've wanted to see hagia sophia for about 30 years and I have to say it exceeded my very high expectations for it. Prior to the building of St. Peter's, it was the largest church in Christendom and to my mind, it give St. Peter's a run for its money. Part of what I do like about it is that it shows the reality of religious struggle more than the inexorable march toward one way of perceiving the matter. Now, that is now. When it was built, it articulated a single view of the divine.

The Tokopi place was an exercise in opulence. we had quite a bit of time to walk around there. I would have much rather had the time at the archeological museum. They had a great deal of archaic to roman sculpture that you can get within inches up, a break taking experience. Also the layout on the various levels of Troy excavations was pretty instructive.

That was day one. Day two we went to the Spice market. Jeff and I really enjoyed that experience as we didn't really have a market experience on our first trip to Turkey. We bought various peppers and other spices. The Bosophorus boat ride was pretty cool as well. I'm going to trip and set up a flicker site and just post photos there and will attempt a couple right now. We ate lunch a way up the river and hit the Kora museum on the way back which has a pretty remarkable set of frescos. I skipped the grand bazzar in favor of yoga practice. I meant to say back up that the call to prayer section that the after noon prayer typically coincides with when I've been getting some afternoon yoga in, so I like that nice serendity.

So far, the food has been a bit disappointing on the trip. we haven't made good choices at lunch, both lunch days have been pretty bland. and dinner at the hotel was pretty abysmal last night, though okay the previous evenings, despite the lack of vegetarian options as main course. Salads have been universally great and the turkish cheese excellent. Jeff and I are planning a lovely lunch for ourselves today on our free day in turkey and we may inquire about the menu in the evening. It is free at the hotel, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

Experiencing the fruits

2011-06-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about life as a teacher is that sometimes, occasionally, but sometimes, your students also become teachers and they become friends. Today in Waco was kind of a day about that. Three of my five closests girl friends in Waco, Lenore, Amy, and Gabrielle, were at one point in time my students, in different contexts, Lenore as an MA student, Amy as a PhD student and Gabrielle as a returning adult undergrad. I've also taught with all of them in a variety of BIC contexts, they know my life, my work and it is really nice. Of course, this is a really really small percentage of students that pass through the corridors of my life, but some definitely stick.

I was reminded of that possibility today also running into Beth (a former BIC student, now yoga student, now teacher of English at Baylor) with Lydia (a colleague who has never been my student...) how there's just a nice way of seeing people grow up and it turns out you have this shared love.

Beth has been practicing yoga every day (something she's had a hard time establishing since transitioning from more of an asthanga practice to doing Iyengar with me (side note to last post) Beth's teacher in Houston is Yannis and Yannis practiced frequently with George, Sam and perhaps even John. not sure of the time frame on that... and if that is not a strange enough web.. but part of why she's been practicing every day is yoga glo and she's been doing Christina's classes.. and she was telling me about watching CT and said, "that's a very Anne -ish" thing she just did." very funny. I guess it depends on who you meet first.

I also went to a group practice that Sam Rice ran last night. Often Wednesdays when I'm not subbing myself for CT and Sam, I go to Devon's hard work class, but last night I decided to go to group practice. I'm so glad I did. One thing that is cool is seeing how much calf mashing has caught on as a pre class warm up...but that aside... It is totally amazing to see how much Sam has blossomed as a teacher in the past year or so. It is really a testament to the company you keep and she totally changed her life to keep Christina's company. it shows in so many ways. Some of it is just mannerism stuff, language, phrasing... but also in a tangible growing of confidence in the seat of the teacher and sequencing. Anyway, it is cool to be a part of that transmission as the Iyengar emissary to Iyengar land. Lots of what she taught was from Christina's recent immersion and there were clear elements of that that had their roots in one way or another in Iyengar land.

So many threads connect us, the threads we weave are beautiful, perhaps even more so because we do not always see the design on the front end. It's beauty startles us.

Another fun day with yoga and philosophy

2011-06-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had a chance to sub for Gillian at the Castle. It was a 55 minute community class and for a while I was a little flummoxed about what to teach in such a short period of time, but then I thought to myself, you know sometimes that's all the time I have to practice myself and what do I do. I open the hips, open the shoulders and get upside down, so that's pretty much what we did. Then I stayed for Gia's class rather than sit in traffic. Gia offers a very lovely eclectic flow and it go me thinking about various styles of yoga and how they mix and mingle in contemporary America.

Jeff and I went down to San Marcos last weekend to take George Purvis' workshop. George is one of my favorite Iyengar teachers. So many of his instructions just stay in my practice brain. He's also a super nice, non pretentious guy. It was a nice blending of Anusara and Iyengar worlds. Jason Lobo lives in Christina and Kelly's place down there and is holding classes at the San Marcos School of Yoga, so there's that primary link, and Jason studied with George up in Dallas at BKS studio so there's that link.. but then some Iyengar people came down but the room was filled with people who study with Jason and Brooke and Ana down there and who are newer to Iyengar yoga.

Anyway, one of the students in the workshop asked George about his home practice and George related great tales of 108 attitude adjusters of various sorts and 5 minute handstand holds to the song Bertha Bertha. George and John Friend and Sam Dillion all used to practice together back in the day so indeed the roots of Anusara and Iyengar land working together go way back.

I've been reading Edwin' Bryant's commentary as part of my morning quiet practice time (meditation, pranayama, spiritual reading). I'm currently in his commentary about the various siddhis and he actually talks a good bit about the various tantric traditions of yoga and then concludes.

“Thus, while siddhi/sakta/tantra metaphysics is a wonderful and vibrant spiritual universe in its own right, with deep roots in the ancient Indic past, and with its own internal coherence, logic, and appeal, it is not by any means the same as the system being taught by Patanjali” (Edwin Bryant commentary on III, 29 p. 360).

That's right but I got to thinking that Iyengar yoga itself is not the same think as the system being taught by Patanjali for all sorts of reasons. Iyengar people may see that book as central to practice but it is quite clear that we are not practicing yoga in the manner in which Patanjali taught his students. there's no way we could be.

And still there is a distinctiveness of style to some forms of hatha practice. George touched on this some in his comments, that some styles pretty much are recognizable wherever you go, I think it is a lot like church denominations. You know that you are in a Baptist or Presbyterian Church pretty immediately, even if you had not read the signs so to speak...

But that some contemporary styles have a more distinct lineage, is still not the same thing as the original historical lineage. Edwin continues his commentary and uses a great metaphor of kitacharie to talk about what we are typically doing when we do yoga in the west.

“The integrity and distinctiveness of these traditions have a tendency to be erased into a hodgepodge in their Western exportations—into a kind of kitchorie Yoga. In Inidia, a typical meal consists of a subji, vegetable dish; dal, lentil soup; rice; chappati, unleavened bread: and perhaps some other items, each with its own distinct flavorings and spices. After the meal is enjoyed, the leftover are often combined and served the next day as kitchorie, at which point all the flavorings are merged together into a homogenous whole. Similarly, the multiple yogic traditions of India such as tantra and classical yoga, despite their very distinctive features and practices in their traditional settings, tend to be merged into a kitchorie sort of yoga in many of its Western forms.” (Edwin Bryant commentary on III, 29 p. 360).

The Kitchorie yoga sort of strikes me as non-denominational worship experience. You don't necessarily know what you are going to get. A lot depends on teacher, location, but still you know you are going inside to find what is worthwhile.

How to follow along on the Turkey Greece trip

2011-05-29T15:55:00.001-07:00

I"m participating in a study abroad program that leaves next week. I've set up a course blog for the BIC students and myself to use while we are over there. I'll mostly post on it while I'm there unless there's some yogic insight or another that I want to share.

What's cool about this blog is that it funnels both my posts and the student posts onto a single reading space. They will be posting responses to course reading and also reflections on their travels... as will I.

http://homepages.baylor.edu/thebicblog/

Fun day with yoga and philosophy

2011-05-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

I had a fun time teaching focus on form this morning. There were a good number of people there which adds to the energy of the class. Lots of people I didn't know, but some I'm used to seeing. I felt like being funny this morning and people laughed at my jokes.

We worked with a backbend sequence from the Abbey. I'm getting a lot out of focusing my practice and teaching from these sequences. I'm planning on using them as the base of practice until I get a new set in Durango.

I've been on a really good wave of energy with respect to writing as well lately. Today, I sent off two abstracts for upcoming conferences and edited collections.

here's one on the Protagoras for SAGP in the Fall
Unfortunately, the Protagoras is often overshadowed by the hegemony of the Republic and the Apology in interdisciplinary humanities programs, traditional introduction to philosophy courses, and surveys of ancient philosophy as well. This omission is particularly unfortunate because the dialogue as a whole, and the various character portraits it contains, are valuable resources in our ongoing endeavors to engage students in a variety of classroom settings. The dialogue engages a number of important themes that are helpful to consider in the overall context of contemporary higher education: the value of education in and of itself, what we hope to become with the education we receive, the role of education in the cultivation of good citizenship. As I see it, this dialogue offers a challenging call for liberal educators to take on a more prominent role in the public sphere because it shows an integral link between the domain of the classroom and the domain of the citizen.

and here's one I'm really excited about writing for a proposed volume on Feminism and Popular Culture

Feminism in Sex in the City: So Whatever Happened to those Philosopher Queens?

Plato wrote his philosophical masterpiece, The Republic, sometime around 380BCE. In it, Socrates talks with prominent young citizens of Athens about the possibility of finding justice in the individual soul and how we might order a city to sustain justice in the city and the soul. Though most feminist scholars do not regard Plato in sympathetic terms, at least one aspect of his vision, the equal education of women, has become accepted reality in our contemporary world.
Just as Plato seems an uneasy fit in today’s feminist landscape, feminism itself is in a tough conceptual place. Many women under the age of thirty-five do not self-identify as feminist. Issues central to early waves of feminism: choice, equality in the work place are under siege with the rise of “pro-life” and “opting-out” movements. Yet, at the same time many social goals of early feminism are now simply part of the fabric of our social reality. Women hold powerful positions in corporate America, political office at the local through the national level. Women make up increasingly larger percentages of the college population and graduate at higher rates than men. Women are overtaking men in many advanced degree programs as well. And yet, there is an ongoing discomfort with the label of feminism in our culture, particularly in our popular culture.
With an eye toward establishing more positive regard for feminism and forging new spaces were feminists can contribute to the transformation of society, this paper seeks to explore how feminist concerns are portrayed in the popular TV show Sex in the City and the two subsequent movies of the same name,
On first glance, the characters in the popular series seem the antithesis of feminist role models, much as Plato seems an unlikely feminist ally. They use sex for power; they seem more interested in shoes than social issues. They are more focused on relationships with men than promoting relations of equality between the sexes. Fashion Week drives them rather than philosophical discussion. They seem to identify with the body as an object of male desire more than their minds as modes of self-reflection. And yet, there they are. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha are four women working, and working hard, in the contemporary world. Despite its glitz and over dramatization, the show presents a realistic model of the challenges facing women in the post-feminist world. Some chose family over career, others the career over family, others work hard to integrate both successful. In many ways, these four characters embody the wide range of choices that generations of feminists have word hard to create the social spaces. They realistically illustrate the struggles of women working in the still largely male-dominated fields.
I will argue that each of the characters in the show, in fact, embody a feminist model of flourishing on the individual level and the communal level. Indeed, the friendship between the four women is a powerful model of non-traditional community that we would do well to acknowledge and embrace. The friendships between the four women also model a genuine community of caring that is not based on traditional models of the family or patriarchy.
More broadly, these aspects of the show illustrate how popular culture can both embody and further philosophical concepts that can prompt positive social change. In fact, the show is its own kind of Platonic dialogue, showing philosophical ideas in the messy everyday reality of life. Plato wrote dialogues not abstract metaphysical treatises. Feminist should take seriously the dialogic form embedded in shows such as Sex in the City just as scholars increasingly recognize the philosophical importance of Plato’s decision to write dialogues.

I also worked on a proposal for a conference in cyprus in 2012 and reworked some of the charmides chapter.

off to do some turkish, get a massage and teach focus on form. tomorrow, some thoughts on yoga and philosophy as enagement of self and other.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2011-05-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

I'm 45 years old today. Somehow that seems a significant age to have reached.

So far it has been a great day, I got up around 6 and saw that Jeff put flowers by my bed. I did meditation and pranayama. Walked Milo before the rain started. When I went in the kitchen to make the morning smoothies, I saw that Jeff had already cut up a lovely plate of fruit and nuts.

We had a nice breakfast and watched the rain roll in.

I worked on some revisions Steve had given me a while back on the last part of the Republic Chapter. I'm trying to get all my back log of revisions done and all writing projects for conferences and volumes that are due in June or July done before I leave for Turkey. So far, I've had an amazingly productive month of may, so I may well get it done.

I'm getting ready to go work on twists day three from the recent PW retreat. I've practiced day one and two a couple times and taught elements of day one twice. We are practicing day four on Friday, and I remember that these twists really opened my back up for backbends, so here goes.

Reflections from the Women's Intensive

2011-05-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

This is a bit long for a single post, but it is broken up by days.

Abbey Log. Women’s Advanced Intensive Spring 2011

April 30, 20011

I got here yesterday around 4:00, unpacked, did a practice, mostly supta padangushtansana work to untravel my hips and inversions. Then I went for a walk before dinner. This is the fifth time I’ve come to the Abbey, my third advanced retreat and I’m definitely getting more used to being here, finding it easier to sink into the serenity of the place.

We had rice pilaf for dinner. I’ve decided to relose the weight I lost for the wedding, so I didn’t have dessert, even though the whipped cream looked tempting. I talked with Leslie from Connecticut. She studies Sanskirt and runs workshops for yoga people on chanting and Sanskirt. I also sat with Laurie and Janet from Oregon.

Some people I recognize, some I don’t. Some I see from other places around and about Iyengar-land, other people only here. Patricia seems radiant, delighted to see everyone and begin our work together.

Last night, we had the opening circle. We go around and say our names and where we are from and how long we have been practicing. There is a range from 5-6 years to over thirty. I’m in the more than 15 less than 20 range myself. It is very inspiring to see so many people who have dedicated their lives to this way of teaching and practice, a tangible way of seeing at least some aspect of the road ahead, at least to the extent we can.

I’ve been travelling and working a lot lately and I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend this week dedicated to my practice.

May 1, 2011

Day One was really great. I woke up to the screeching sound of the peacocks. Meditated and did pranayama. Ate some breakfast, wrote for awhile, then took a walk. Patricia asked that we come to class a bit early and begin with supta baddha konasana so I complied.

We worked a lot on the hips with standing poses and a lot of supta padangusthasana. It was intense work but not a brutal slog through the standing pose syllabus. Very peaceful and sattvic work actually. Patricia is insistent that we not work in a way that causes any pain, particularly when working with an injury.
She also talked about the importance of finding joy in the practice and releasing the effort enough to experience the true effect of the poses on all the sheaths of the body.

After that lunch, salad and cheese. I manage to stick with that plan and not have the huge garbanzo bean and pecan wrap that accompanied the salad and snacks. I was much happier in pranayama as a result.

During the afternoon break, I worked on notes and actually took a nap. I almost never nap. I find it too depressing to try to go to sleep twice in a day, but this was great.

We started the afternoon session with a recitation and discussion of the last sutra on pranayama 2:52, and we got through III.3. Leslie led us in the chant, then one person said the sutra in sanskirt and in English and then said what the sutra meant in their own words. Eventually, we engaged in a more general discussion, mostly about pratyahara. I find the view of pratyahara as the practice of making the senses sacred, a very helpful way of looking at the practice. Yes, there is a turning inward and one can see that as a sort of renunciation of the world and we talked about that some, whether pratyahara really means we cannot enjoy the prakriti world of experience at all. I don’t really think that is the most productive way of looking at pratyahara. Rather, that we are using a manifestation of our own prakritic embodiment to seek within. It is another way of understanding the body as a vehicle for consciousness.

We were listening to the bells at the Abbey right before beginning pranayama with three OMs. The sound of the bells faded away. Patricia said that when we could not hear the resonance of our own ohms anymore we should start savasana. That notion of the resonance receding is itself a powerful image of pratyahara. The senses recede like the sound of music recedes. In one sense, music, or any work of art draws us to it through the senses, but it often gives back to the senses both the desire and the ability to turn inward.

In pranayama class, Patricia systemically went through the early stages of various forms of digital breathing. All of these lead toward nadi shodna.

May 2, 2011

It’s the morning of day three. Yesterday, we worked on standing poses and back bends. I am amazed that there is always a new variation of chair dwi pada. Anyway, the class was great. My body has been rather stiff lately, but all the opening work at least felt like a bit of light was breaking through the stiffness.

In the afternoon class, we continued our discussion about pratayahara and moved into a discussion of dharana and dhyana. Patricia made the observation that we have an easier time articulating our feelings about sense perception than we do our experiences with concentration and meditation. For me some of it has to do with some lingering sense of “my experience” being different or not interesting to others. This is putting it more strongly than I feel it. But everyone knows that everyone has sense perceptive experience, some how the patterns of the mind seem more personal, more private and there’s some sense that people will think I’m nuts if I articulate it. I know this is not true. In fact, when I do articulate the landscape of the mind, people invariably know the territory, at least people who have been exploring the territory. Some of it too, reminds me about sharing faith stories. There’s this misperception that I have that it is entirely personal, but faith stories and experiences are ultimately so much the same.

Kathleen shared about believing in the process of grace and right after that Pauline shared her decision to “give the Krisna thing a try.” It was funny to me because it sounded so much like “giving the Christian thing a try.” And though Christians don’t generally see it this way, they are the same bhakti path.

More later, off to do supta baddha konasana before class.

May 3, 2011

Morning of Day 4.

I’m actually a little sore in the upper back from twisting, I wonder if backbends are on the docket again today. I did better with the twists both in the doing of them and in managing my mind in them than the last time around. I’m getting near the domain of being able to look for the clasp. Twists are a hard set of poses for me. I had this insight yesterday when we were talking about samyama in philosophy time that one thing that is difficult about them is that I separate them off from other things, generally speaking. For example, I don’t mind parrivrritta trikonasana in with some other standing poses. The jatharas are fine because I usually think of them in the context of abdominal work. One thing that was helpful the last time I did twists with Patricia was all the linking she did with backward bending actions in twists. I can do those actions and bringing that awareness into a set of poses that I can’t really do well calmed me and made me more able to access the twists.

A similar thing happened with baya kumbaka yesterday. Normally, I don’t do that retention after exhale because it is contra indicative for depression and when I do it, it generally does make me feel somewhat morose. But she had us alternate pratyloma and two ujjayis then the kumbaka and that was really the first time I could experience the space after exhalation without an element of despair. It was experiencing it in combination with other pranayamas that I like and am more familiar with the terrain of.

It reminded me of my observation yesterday about this believe that our experience is separate. Lenore and I had a email exchange yesterday about difficulties in parenting and relationships and I was reminded of how often our suffering keeps us from reaching out to those who have the same or related experiences and often that closing off increases the suffering.

So my insight of the day “connection is key.” Always connect.

Morning of Day Six

It has been a good retreat. I am ready to go home. I miss Jeff and Milo but I am working on staying present for the experiences of the last day. Yesterday we worked on groin related things, hamstrings hip openers leading to eka pada sirsasana and yogadandasana. Right around malasana, I did have a strange twinge in my middle back and I was very proud of myself for listening to it and telling Patricia, she gave me some other poses to do. It is a difficult thing to decide not to do.

Tuesday afternoon instead of philosophy and pranayama we had a poetry circle. People brought poems to read. Several people read poems they had written. Many had Mary Oliver. Rumi and John O’Donohue were two other favorites. This evolved into some personal stories about various people who were not present due to illness or death. I am more used to this sort of experience in my visits to Anusara-land. It was very clear that this all-women’s gathering is a very important time for women in the group and for many of the women has been since 1993. About as long as I have been doing yoga. Becky read one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, Wild Geese. Patricia said that it was the very first poem read at the first gathering. The last line of the poem talks about seeing one’s place in the ordering of things and it strikes me that is one of the things I have gotten out of the retreat this time around.

That there is a progression to life, every one here is at a stage on the way. Most are older than me, a few younger, a few right around my age. Seeing how yoga manifests in the lives of women (people more generally) but women in this context at the different stages of life and hearing the reflections of older women about their younger experiences is very comforting. It is a very tangible expression of the fact that we don’t walk the path alone. It was very much a yogic communion of saints experience.

From last week

2011-05-09T12:24:00.001-07:00

Blog post.

On dedication to art: musings on the life of practice.

Jeff and I went to see the Austin Symphony last Thursday evening, right before I left to go to the Abbey. It was their one hundred year anniversary. Itzhak Perlman was the guest performer.

The show started with the two pieces that were played at the original concert back 100 years ago. A violin was prominently displayed with that history as well. We both love Austin and it was cool to see that particular dimension of Austin history.

Mom and Dad are season ticket holders. They had originally encouraged us to get tickets, but it was the evening before I was leaving for the Abbey and at the time Jeff was working and getting south at that time of day is really rough. So I said no. As luck would have it, at least luck for us, Mom and Dad decided not to use their own tickets because of Dad’s first post shoulder operation appointment and they figured they would be wiped out from that. Christina was teaching with Ross and so I figured, let’s make it happen.

Jeff and I met up at Whole foods, had some pizza and headed over to the event. A beautiful Texas evening. The outside of the Palmer center is really one of those outdoor spaces that transforms space. I see the sky line all the time, but looking at it through the frame of the Palmer center sets it off nicely. They were broadcasting the show and so people were coming to sit out on the lawn to watch it. We had a glass of wine and headed inside

Music itself transforms space. Brings people from all walks of life together. That’s another great thing about going to the Long center. There are society people, all dressed up and people with tattoos, parents with their children, young and old, together in groups, lots of people just there with themselves and the music.

The music was great. Itzhak Perlman joined them for one piece. Watching him take the seat of the performer was really moving. He had contracted polio as a young child. He walks with great difficulty using two arm supports. He uses his hands to set his legs in place. It was such a clear expression of “ taking the seat” and then boom. The fruits of a lifetime of practiced dedication to his art. What a gift.

His presence was itself a gift of the Longs, the founder of the Long center and it got me thinking about the many gifts music has given me over the years.

Plato's Protagoras, Popular Culture, and Alternate Realities

2011-04-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

I got up really early this morning. Like 4:30, early. A few months back I saw a call for papers on Interdisciplinary Studies to be given at the Popular Culture Conference. As I do interdisciplinary studies and as I am always on the look out for a conference in San Antonio, I sent in an abstract.

Orginally, I thought Jeff and I would go down for the weekend. But it turned out that Jeff came along for the Sundance conference and then Mandy's wedding ended up being this weekend and so it really didn't work out to do the whole weekend thing, so I got up and drove down for my paper at 8 AM. At this point, it seemed more like something I had obligated myself to do more than something I really wanted to do.

Also, I am still in a bit of post APS I love ancient philosophy buzz and so hitting a very different domain of academia wasn't really where my mind was either..

I was even a bit more worried in that my paper which looks at the Protagoras as an exhortation for philosophers to take a more public role was matched with two best practices papers and I thought there would be a bit of a disconnect for whomever happened to show up at 8 AM.

Well, the session was really great. Luckily, my co panelists had friends along with them so the room was somewhat populated along with the conference organizer and two other people who appeared to just show up out of intrinsic interest.

A lot of what I was reading into the Protagoras was exactly what they were trying to achieve in their interdisciplinary program at Southern Mississippi and we had a really great conversation after about the inter relationship between the papers and about interdisciplinarity in general as a mode of education that orients both teachers and students toward intrinsic value.

It was really beautiful in downtown SAT, exactly the sort of weather I imagined for this weekend I thought Jeff and I would do. So I walked around a bit and soaked in the vibe of what might have been a fun time and headed home to get ready for the weekend now planned. It was really like seeing an alternate path through time. Weird I know, but it gave me this sense of what time travel might be like, like just stepping onto a different path through...

Another great thing is I sat down pretty much right after I got home and wrote down the changes I wanted to make with the experience still fresh in my mind. One of my more fun and productive writing sessions of late.

Here at Sundance

2011-04-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

We had a pretty uneventful day as far as travel days go. Uneventful meaning all the events that were supposed to happen, happened and no unexpected events occurred. A couple weeks Chris Long came down to speak at Baylor and he had an epic "travel hell" day so the possibility of how wrong travel days can go was pretty present in my mind.

But Mom dropped us off. There was practically no line at ATX. I had a coupon from my last philosophy junket to Tampa so we got a free veggie burger at TGIF.

Breann picked us up at SLC. The drive up through Park City was beautiful and it is even more stunning now that we are here. There's a bit of a disconnect in my mind in that all the sensory experience is saying, "this is the kind of place to have an awesome vacation." but here I am at a professional meeting.

In my experience, there are two sorts of philosophers, those who like conferences and those who don't. I'm in the camp of those who like conferences. I like to travel. I like to see people. I like the mental stimulation. Particularly when I lived in Waco, I liked to get away. But regardless of where you find your self on the academic range of pro conferencing or not, it is pretty much where a lot of academia happens. Not so much the day in and day out of teaching and administrative work (though there are conferences for that) but in the ongoing exchange of ideas that really is the life force of academic work, that's conferences.

Interestingly, Breann mentioned what a great opportunity it was to be part of hosting a conference early in her career. She's a recent graduate of the school Shannon and Mike teach at. She also mentioned the Sophocles conference and other speakers who come in and I got to thinking about it and I realized, it really wasn't until a couple years into grad school that I went to a conference. My first year or so I knew people went to SPEP and the like but I didn't really get what they were about until I went to a Comparative Literature conference that Penn State hosted. I had this "aha" moment about seeing academics in action and thought, well, I could do that.

So anyway. that's what's on my mind in the few minutes before heading down for the official proceedings to begin.

Below are a few shots from the plane, a few of our mountain lodge, and one of me doing a very cushy chair sarvangasana.

Looking to APS but... teaching Philosophy and Yoga is what I did today

2011-04-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

I really love teaching Aristotle. Part of me hates that I love it so much but really he is the best philosopher to teach. I am constantly perplexed by the difference between teaching Plato whom I love with abiding passion and Aristotle whom I have at best a love hate relationship with. I hate to say it and it is so hard to believe... but I'm better at teaching Aristotle or maybe this is more true. The objective philosopher in my realizes that the philosophy that happens in the classroom when Aristotle is on the docket is on a higher level. Always, invariably, and it bugs the XXXX out of me

I know some if it is my attachment to the form of Plato and the intricacy of his writing. that I want them to love him and his dialogues as I do and with Aristotle I have enough presence of mind to just get out of the way of it. I know also some of it is the whole semester has prepared them for Aristotle and his directness.

Anyway, it is just part of the fabric of my mindset in going to APS. It is always at the Aristotle time of year. I really should not say this, but the prospect of hearing a lot of papers on Aristotle does not really excite me. I personally would be happy to have a sort of concurrent plato stream and aristotle stream.... But still there's the constant reminder of oh remember Aristotle and how great he is to teach..

so that's on my mind.

Chris Long suggested we blog about the conference so I will.

here are some other pre conference thoughts.

1. Packing is always a pain. More of a pain when you live in Austin where it is heading toward 90 and the high by saturday in sundance is supposed to be 49. I borrowed a whole bunch of cold weather gear from my sister who just spent two weeks in Copenhagen.

2. I'm really excited to see everyone. It is a great group. Really fun! Also because I've been going for a while and I've been consistently inviting APS people to speak at BAYylor, I'm really getting to be friends with a lot of these folks.

3. I'm excited to be on the program. This is the first year my paper has actually made it on the program, usually I'm very close and I'm asked to comment. So I received my comments from Andrea on my paper and they were great and that's already been food for thought.

4. I'm totally excited about the Sundance venue. APS has typically been at some pretty cool places. The Banquet dinner at the Isabella Gardner Museum Courtyard in Boston is just one example of many I could mention. APS has been the source of many a magical night.

5. I'm also thrilled that my husband JEff is coming with me. It is his first APS though he's done a few SAGPs.

So anyway, those are my thoughts on the eve of departure.

Aristotle, Augustine, and Anusara

2011-04-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was teaching my yoga at high noon class and I was struck by how many different ways we can explain the various ways that the body attempts to engage in asana.

I've been teaching Aristotle for the past few weeks in Classical Philosophy. I love teaching Aristotle and this semester he's really been the highlight of the class. Anyway, Aristotle's view about the cultivation of any moral virtue, any yama or niyama is precisely that. It is a matter of cultivation, of practice. He would agree with Pattabi Jois' advice, "practice, all is coming." If you want to have an asana practice, just do it. Just keep on practicing and eventually you will become a yogi or a yogini. It isn't like he starts with the point of view that one is a yogi by nature or not a yogi by nature. Rather, we cultivate the yogi nature through practice. Practice, long uninterrupted practice, is the key. How do you know when you've become a yogi, you take pleasure in the activity in and of itself.

So from an Aristotlean point of view, it really doesn't matter if the body is flexible or stiff, aligned with grace or not, just do it.

I was helping a studen with headstand... she did a good bit of yoga for many years but is new to practice this time around. She observed that her wrist didn't want to press down in head stand prep and I said, well, just tell it to press down and eventually it will listen to you.

But it got me thinking about how fascinating the process is. We notice what goes wrong and then make a judgement about why it is that way. Something in the nature of my wrist just doesn't do it. I gave the pep talk that Laurie Blakeney gives "just start at the body part until it moves." and that "yoga asks us to become supernatural."

But at the same time I was thinking about how easy it is to assign blame to the body. That there's something flawed in its nature that it doesn't want to align.

One of the great things about Aristotle is that he really doesn't have a fixed view of human nature. Our nature is what we make of it through habit and learning. It is so radically different from the Christian point of view where we are flawed by nature.

Then I was thinking about the Universal Principles of Alignment in the Anusara tradition. There is an optimal alignment for the body. Iyengar yoga thinks this too. The deeper I get in the Iyengar practice, the more I see the UPAs as a distillation of what is undergirding all the Iyengar instruction.

but regardless of whether you learn how to do triangle pose through UPAs or by following the directions in LOY...
still there's the question, why does the body not align, in fact it is even more of an issue in a philosophical system that assumes basic goodness and sees the body as a means of liberation.

There are all sorts of possible answers... Maybe we don't know what right alignment is until we experience it, we live in a world that does not encourage optimal. We get used to being unalligned and we see that as "our nature."

but what to me is fascinating, is just by observing what goes wrong, we can learn what optimal is. Even in our flaws, we learn to align and in doing so, we make our nature along the way.

The Month in Review

2011-04-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

Well it has been an eventful six weeks.

Jeff decided to quit his job and make yoga chairs for a living. Shortly after giving his two weeks notice, we drove up to Dallas for the Edwin Bryant workshop. It was my first opportunity to study with Edwin and it was just wonderful approaching the text with a more academic context. I really enjoyed reading the text as if I were reading it in a graduate seminar rather than as a bunch of yogis referring to the text in the context of asana. A great example of my two worlds coming together.

Karin O'Bannon taught yoga classes that alternated with the philosophy sessions and she did a wonderful job restoring the body and the mind from the work of the philosophy. It was my first opportunity to study with her as well and I was impressed with her clarity, vision and focus.

The day after Jeff's last day at work, we left to go the Patricia Walden workshop at the Abbey. Patricia was ill and we had Chris Saudek as our sub for the first two days. It has been several years since I studied with Chris. Again, her focus, clarity of instruction and authencity were remarkable. So many gems of instruction and insight that alone were worth the price of admission.

Patricia taught the last three days, two days of backbends and one finale of arm balances and twistings. Working with Patricia is always a call to deepen the intensity and focus of my own practice. More on that whole experience later.

We came home for a week and Theresa Rowland and Devon Dederich gave a workshop on Avoding future suffering. It was based on the three year training they have just completed with Stephanie Quirk. I learned a lot about how to work with the hips in standing poses.

Then we went out to Deborah's Ranch for five days with Gabriella. Gabriella excels at teaching how to help each other in poses and at how to see. I still remember the first time I really saw what a yoga teacher was pointing to in another student's body. It was electrifying. I compare it to learning to read a painting or a sculpture. Anyway, she is incredible at showing how she sees.

It has been an amazingly rich few weeks. Having the opportunity to study with so many long term IYengar students revealed the fruits of 30 and 40 year practices in very tangible ways. Intensity, focus, clarity, vision, open heartedness, the tenacity and relentlessness. As patricia said, "it is not an easy path." but wow seeing what pursuing the path in such a long uninterrupted devoted, intelligent way gives will fuel my practice for many years to come.

Back to Blogging

2011-03-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

Hello Avid Readers of Anne's blog.

I keep on having great ideas to blog on but never seem to sit down to write them. Partly, I've had major computer issues for the past two weeks and partly I've just been busy teaching yoga and philosophy and doing other work related activities

A couple weeks back Peggy issued a challenge that we write down what we actually practice and I thought well that would be a great thing to blog about, a practice blog. Particularly given all that I have on the yoga docket in the upcoming month.

Jeff and I leave tomorrow for a week at the Abbey with Patricia Walden. Right after that, Theresa Rowland and Devon are giving a workshop in Austin, then off to study with Gabriella for five days. I really am so grateful for the opportunity I have to study with teachers of this caliber. It is an ongoing motivation to hold myself to the highest standard.

The downside of that, of course, can be a perpetual dissatisfaction with where I am. I've been taping my classes trying to get one I'm happy enough with to send to Mary Obendorfer. So far, I have two classes that I'd give myself a B or a B+. I liked the last class well enough, but I wasn't wearing Iyengar sanctioned attire and it really was rather distracting. So back to the bloomers, solid colors and contained hair next time around along with clearer instruction, less words, etc.

Last night, I had the opportunity to sub Christina's group practice which was a lot of fun. Christina has some very enthusiastic, dedicated, capable students. They seem to appreciate the brief forays into Iyengar land. We started off with some advanced calf mashing techniques, classic gomukasana and then a long foray into the world of supta padangushtasana, padmasana, and the inversion cycles.

Here's my practice for the week.

Monday, morning meditation and pranayama. Rope sirsasana before class, a bit of class before my taping started.

Tuesday, morning meditation and pranayama, practiced standing poses and inversions with Emily during class as she was the only one who showed up.

Wednesday, morning meditation and pranayama, led group practice for Christina, worked a lot with suptapadangusthasana variations leading to simasana and then we got upside down.

This morning very brief meditation, pranayama and upside downs.

New Class I'll be teaching at Baylor this Fall

2011-02-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

Yoga and Philosophy in Contemporary American Culture.

In this practice based class, we will explore the various ways that traditional yoga philosophy and practice has adapted to become an important aspect of self-care for millions of Americans.

In each class, we will discuss yoga philosophy and do a yoga practice. We will read the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s famous aphorisms about yoga. We will also read several memoirs about contemporary yoga practice: Waking, Yoga from the Inside Out, First There is a Mountain, and watch several films about yoga. Students will be required to keep a semester long blog about this class and how it draws to together a variety of elements of their BIC experience.

I'm really excited to be merging my philosophy and my yoga worlds in this class. For so many years, I've endeavored to keep those domains of my life separate, but I've enjoyed teaching yoga so much for the Baylor faculty and staff that I decided to take the plunge and start teaching Baylor Students as well.

It will also feed nicely into the next book I want to write about Yoga and Philosophy in Contemporary American Culture.

Yoga and Youth

2011-02-02T08:51:00.000-08:00

One of my high school friends, Susan Brinkley recently posted this picture of me, circa 1984/1985 on Facebook. I think it was the summer after we graduated maybe the following summer after we returned from our first year in college. In any event, it was about ten years before I started yoga.

I was struck by so many things about the photo, but mostly it created this vivid awareness of how much yoga has "improved" my body. For thematic placement, I picked a photo from my return to my 25th high school reunion last year. I am explaining about the giant rain column Christina and I encountered one day in the movie theatre parking lot. You can see that my right shoulder is no longer four inches higher than my left and particularly how much more lifted my chest is.

I have been working a lot on observing what my yoga students really need to work on and in the waco yoga class it is shoulders and chest lift. Anyway, I shared about this picture and mentioned the lift of the chest and one of my students said, oh I thought that was just how your posture was. Well, here's proof positive that was not the case.

My mom also said that in high school I had no arches in my feet and now I do.

so long story short, I'll take yoga over yoga, particularly since I don't have any choice in the matter.

A couple more blog posts coming soon. Stay tuned.

Evaluation, Grades, Teaching

2010-12-21T15:47:00.000-08:00

One of my Social World Students, Nicole Lloyd, sent me this link http://www.soulpancake.com.

It is a project that attempts to make big philosophical questions seem more relevant. I thought I'd pass it along as it is rather cool. Nicole herself is a great philosopher in the making. She has the courage to articulate her own point of view even when she knows it will be unpopular.

I do hope our paths cross again during her Baylor experience. They may well not in that I don't teach too many classes these days, but I wish her and all the social worlders this semester good luck in their ongoing pedagogical journey both inside and outside the BIC. I

mentioned in a previous post that I am often a bit sad at the end of the semester. Another emotion that frequently arises at the end of the semester? Frustration. This is the time where a grade has to be put on the experience.

I think both teachers and students experience a disconnect between what is most valuable in the classroom experience and what it really boils down to grade wise. I really do understand why some colleges experiment with no grades or pass fail.

Particularly this far away from being a student, I have a hard time remember the grade motivation. Teachers will often say "grades aren't important." But of course they are very important to students whose GPA and financial aid often depends on the final judgment.

Anyway, this time of year gets me thinking about what exactly is it that I'm evaluating. Ultimately, I think I am evaluating my perception of their commitment to the class and to the learning experience more generally than their actual performance of mastery of the material.

Partly this point of view has to do with not really having an attachment to philosophy as subject matter but to philosophy as a way of thinking, an ongoing mode of engaging self, other, and the world. Truthfully, that's a lot harder to grade than mastery of the material.

So I try to create "assignments" that emphasis ongoingness, journals, blogs, small group discussions, class participation, attentiveness alertness, even attendance.

it strikes me that students often gear up for the big ticket items like an exam or a paper, but let the smaller things fall by the wayside, understandable with all they have going on...but I realized I need to be much clearer about that fact that these aspects of class importance are really what I value. i don't really value great text performance with no ongoing engagement.

Anyway, one of the great things about this social world class, almost every student seemed engaged throughout the whole semester. Well, at least 80 percent of them. but there was no one who was just completely checked out, but truthfully the way the syllabus was set up, the points really went more to mastery than engagement and there was in several cases a bit of a disconnect between what I thought the student earned grade wise and what the grades themselves said.

Take an Action

2010-12-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

Kofi Busia is a long time student of B.K.S. Iyengar. In fact, B.K.S. was his second and last yoga teacher. He's got many, many great stories to tell, but I'm not going to repeat his here except maybe the kudu story. Kofi tries to get you to stay in poses for a while so that you can read what the poses reveal to you about yourself. So he tells all sorts of fascinating stories ranging from the Epicureans and what they believed "eat simple foods" how to kill a kudu.. basically you run after one all day and eventually it stops, the point being, it is no small thing to kill a kudu. ... "It takes all day to kill a kudu."

Anyway, he hosted a conference in honor of Iyengar a couple years back and edited a book related to the conference called Iyengar the Yoga Master. What is particularly cool about the book is that it has Iyengar teachers but also many teachers from other traditions reflecting on what Iyengar has meant to them.

I "found" the book under my bedside table a few days ago and read Patricia Walden's contribution last night. It is an interview she gave in 2006 titlted "Take an Action." It refers to a famous quote by B.K.S about how to deal with challenge of all sorts...

"take an action, no matter how small. Just take one action."

It is similar to the passage in the Gita about no action on the path, no matter how small, is wasted."

It also reminds me of the great quote by Voltaire, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

So often we think oh, I can't get there from here, the gap is too great and so we use the distance as a reason not to try.

For example, my sister is an amazing yogini and if I were to focus on the gap between what she can do and I can do, it would be pretty depressing. But instead I focus on taking the steps that I can do. No way can I grab my heels unassisted in kapotasana, not now... (Heck it has taken her the last two years to do it and seeing her do it tonight was really unfettered joy.) but I can every day, make the effort to be as PW says, relentless in the thighs.

We had a great practice today at the Love Co oP. fabulous new location at the Amalia foundation.. I haven't practiced with this particular subset of the Austin Anusara population in a while and it was nice to check back in, to see how people have improved in the practice, to reaffirm connection, mostly just to practice.

the sutra for today on the trajectory that Jeff and I are taking through the sutras in preparation for edwin's visit was 1.12 Practice is the steadfast effort to do that/ these things that still the fluctuations." 1.11 talks about practice and detachment as the two means, the two wings of the bird as BKS says it of practice. 1. 13 goes on to describe the nature of the effort more fully ie, uninterruptedly, over a long period of time, with devotion, with knowledge and awareness, but I really like the simplicity of 1.12.

Practice is the steadfast effort to do that.

and the steadfast effort can be very very small, but steadfast nonetheless.

Poses of the Year

2010-12-15T14:03:00.000-08:00

Usually, the end of the semester finds me a bit sad or better put, I find myself a bit sad as the semester ends. This particular group of learners will never come together in quite the same way. I felt that way as both a student and a teacher. particularly after a really great semester. However, I really have very little of that feeling this time around.

Yoga teaching and practice is, in a way, not like that. Classes are more ongoing. People come and go. There's not a fixed group in the same way.

This semester has been a long one for me. A lot happened ranging from getting married, to traveling a lot, to having a lot of interpersonal work dynamics to deal with.

I've loved teaching SW 1 but I think it is likely I'll see a few of them again in capstone, so it is not like saying good bye.

This seemster, I gave that talk on yoga and philosophy at philosophy club and it was so great to see several of my former students from Classical Spring 2010. It was a reunion of sorts and I was reminded that really when the teacher student relationship really works there is a sense in which it really doesn't end. They are still students of philosophy as am I.

So too, yoga. At some point, you are just in it together with your students. They are people on the mat with you or in your life with you. (About a yeara go, I had a party at my house in Waco. I invited all my best female friends and we hit upon a game where each person explained how they knew me. I was really struck by how many of my friends were at one point my students either yogic or philosophic (and how many had taken the Nietzsche seminar... albeit in different years). It really made me see that really what "we" are doing as teachers is to create the context in which we can continue to learn with "our students." Looking for interlocutors...

So how does this relate to pose of the year. It is sort of like that with poses. Some are the focus for a while, but they never really go away and what you learn about them as the focus just stays with you and informs the next focus.

More concretely, A very long time ago in my yoga practice, I hit upon the idea of doing a pose I really needed to work on once a day for the year. It was a tangible way of having a resolution I could keep. I really don't recall getting the idea from anyone. It really came in some ways from not having a local teacher, a way of focusing my practice for myself. More often that not, I'd pick a pose that was really tough but tough in a way that the physical stuck ness of it brings up a certain flight or fight response in me. I thought it was best "just" to confront it a little at a time. It wasn't like I was after mastery in the resolution, more like familiarity. I wanted to make it a pose I didn't flee from. There are very few of these poses: Vira I, supta virasana, gomukasana, padamasana, M3, that I really like now.. but to varying degrees, I've made my peace with them.

At some point, I also added in working on a yama and then a niyama for the year. Last year my resolution in that way was to learn a sutra a day in sanskirt. I started that path, and stuck with the study in english. Finished the whole of the text and started over with Edwin's translation. I'm now into the third pada of Edwin and Jeff and I are doing pada 1-17 and then pada 2 before edwin comes to Dallas.

But there's also always the pose of the year. The first pose of the year I did probably back in 1997 was Vira I. This year it is kapotasana. I decided it would be good to have an off the syllabus pose, and it is a pose I'm tired of not being able to do. A lot of times, I stick with the pose until I overcome my active aversion to the pose and then other things arise in my practice that demand my attention or that a teacher demands that I attend to: feet, parsva actions, padmasana, "there's your work."

The past few years, I've been working with my stuckness in twists, it feels very freeing to move into a different domain of poses.

But in a way, it is like the particular group of students, it is not like twists are going anywhere really, they just aren't the particular focus/configuration of my exploration this time around. So the year of the pouter pigeon it is.

In the middle of grading.

2010-12-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

Occupation is essential Virgina Woolf

I don't know exactly where this quote is from in Virgina Woolf's ouevre probably A Room of One's Own or maybe Mrs. Dalloway. Ah wait, I just googled it and it turns out it is from her last journal entry before she walks into the river weighted down with stones.

Here's more of the entry... "No. I need no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncoming of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying…Occupation is essential. And now I find with some pleasure that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down."

Wow. That's interesting, turns out the quote is surrounded by the minutae of life and the soon to be very present reality of death.

The quote was part of the daily reflection book I've been reading this year. It was the quote of the day on Friday. As it turns out Friday is the day we found out Mom has a very early and highly treatable form of breast cancer. Anyway, the quote originally struck me as something I wanted to blog about with respect to finding renewed enthusiasm for my work. reflecting on the various ways it means to be occupied by something.

I woke up Saturday morning in a bit of a funk and then Jeff's I phone got destroyed in a curious series of events having to do with me doing the laundry and folding the laundry and leaving an unmatched sock out. him putting said clean sock over his water glass so bounder the cat wouldn't drink out of it during the night, but the sock was a conduit for the water and the water ended up soaking his I phone.

So it was a dealing with the death of an i phone sort of morning and it made me feel a bit more somber and withdrawn, sort of like mom and the iphone were one and I really was not feeling like going to teach yoga. I decided not to film the class because I knew I really wasn't at my extroverted best.

Anyway, I went to class and Laura and Alison were there. Laura and Alison are two of the people in Austin I truly consider to be my yoga students. There are a few more than that who come to me regularly enough but I know their primary teachers are elsewhere. Laura and Alison have other Iyengar teachers, but they've also made it an ongoing priority to regularly show up for my regular class. They are both academics. Laura is getting her degree in political philosophy and writing on Nietzsche and Alison is a professor in the history department who works on rather philosophical topics. They are lovely people such great students, they practice, they listen, they ask great questions, they are in a word Receptive... and we have a lot in common just given the particular vocation we've chosen. Anyway, it was such a delightful class that I left feeling renewed and energized.

it is times like that I really do know I am supposed to be a teacher. So often, I do not want to go teach, I'm tired whatever... , but I always feel better after I teach. This is not wanting to go is more often a phenomenon I experience with yoga teaching because it occurs in off work hours when I am giving up "free time." I usually am quite up for philosophy teaching in that it is my "job," but even then I always leave the classroom in a better state of mind than I entered it.

Christina mentioned on her blog or facebook page something about being a good teacher requiring good studentship and I think there's a lot to it. Good teachers are good students. Become a better teacher by becoming a better student.. that sort of idea.

It turns out that This semester yoga wise I've taught all teachers, not yoga teachers, but the three people who regularly came to my Waco class were all english teachers. Very similar phenomenon to my saturday class. Eager, interested, practicing, curious, receptive.

There's just a whole set of metaphors and experiences I can draw on when I teach academics. Like working on a pose being like revising prose. There are broad revisions but also refined ones. It strikes me that we are really working on the text of the body, the text of our life when we are doing asana.

Also, like any great subject matter yoga is infinitely deep. There's always something more to learn, do, see, grapple with. Life, of course, if we let it be is like that to.

Vegan sausage and all.

I know I came to yoga partly because I was eager to continue my studentship. No surprise,

Practice and Detachment and Matthew Sanford's Waking

2010-12-03T13:20:00.001-08:00

Practice and Detachment.

It’s been a good week of yoga teaching and practice. Lots of people came to the Thanksgiving practice, Meg, Susan, and I had a lovely practice Friday afternoon and Saturday morning I taped my class. Sunday Jeff and I practiced and worked with various ways to feel the actions necessary to lift up in lolasana. All of these practices had balances in them in a variety of ways. The pay off definitely came during Peggy’s Advanced class on Monday afternoon. We worked toward Eka Pada Koudiyanasana II which I did from Sirsasana II for the first time. I actually tried it on Saturday after watching Alexis and lo and behold I was there. Now, that partcular pose is not an easy one for me I’m stiff in twisting, I have a long torso… etc. In fact, the first time I tried it in 2007 from parivrrita parsvakonasana I had almost no success. I don’t think I could even get both hands down to the floor.

Another first this week was the classic entry of astravakrasana (from standing). I tried that for the first time three years ago at Feathered pipe and give it a shot every now and then. And it came on both sides during thanksgiving practice.

So then Tuesday morning, I got my period and therefore, am leaving those poses for awhile in favor of the bolster related poses and it is a good opportunity to let go of my attachment to the progress I’ve made and do the poses that are restoring to what I need at the present moment. There’s so much to learn.

At the same time, I’ve been reading Matthew Sanford’s, Waking. I’ve known about the book for quite some time, but have not made the time to read it. Some books that I love are like that, Milan Kundera sat on my bookshelf for years and now he’s so deeply part of the way I look at the world and philosophy and relationality. Anyway, you should read his books and Matthew Sanford’s immediately. But read Waking first…. Kundera can wait. It is amazingly well-written (particularly considering he was trained as an analytic philosopher) and a very good reminder about the ever present possibility to practice yoga and to define precisely what yoga is. There are so many gems to share about the book, but I’ll just limit myself to a couple of observations.

Matthew was in a car accident that his father and sister died in. He almost died himself but emerged from the experience a thirteen year old parapalegic. He realizes early in his recovery that his brother and mother (who also survived the accident) needed him to live and that was a lot of what pulled him through. Throughout the book, he expresses these profound connections to other people and what we can offer each other regardless of circumstance simply by being honestly who we are with each other.

Eventually, he comes to Iyengar yoga. At first, his practice consists of four poses, dandasana, Baddha Konasana, Upavistha Konasana and siddhasana. He notes that the limited range of poses forced him to examine precisely what each pose offered. How often do we do that. Rarely, if ever. We skip over so much because we can do so much.

Welll, off to advanced practice. Backbends on the Junior I syllabus are on the docket. Hope to see you there.

Iyengar in Austin Blog Updated

2010-11-28T18:33:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of updating the Iyengar in Austin Blog. If you know of Iyengar classes in Austin that aren't listed please let me know. The website is http://iyengaryogainaustin.blogspot.com/

In a way, it is sort of a depressing task, I look at so many studios and the most popular and even the "best" of them, so few have certified Iyengar teachers teaching. Many teachers at these studios list Iyengar teachers or the method as an influence, but they are not certified in that method... It is a good indication of the state of affairs the method seems just to be something people do along the way to some fusion of style and influences. I'm glad there is at least that level of presence in the conversation but I definitely think there should be more.

The iyengar in austin blog is one of my attempts to help increase the visibility of Iyengar Yoga in Austin.

So is this blog. Just today, I got an email from someone who has moved to Austin recently and said she read the blog. Very gratifying to know that there is a reading public out there.

More later, working on a post on Socrates and the siddhis among other things.

Keep practicing. Year seventeen on the mat started today.

Filming as an exercise in Svadhyaya.

2010-11-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

As part of gearing up for the next level of Certification Assessment, I've started to film myself teaching. Eventually, like in the next 3-4 months, I have to send a tape to my recommending teacher, Mary Obendorfer. It has been a good long while since I've watched myself teaching on film. I've seen myself on various videos and clips and photos on the web due to being a frequent visitor to the well-documented land of Anusara Yoga, but just watching myself for 30 minutes or so..

I am clearly calmer and more centered as a teacher of yoga than I was four years ago when I went through the last taping process.

My speech which has a tendency to run toward the high speed train type of speech when I am nervous is much better. I have definitely integrated the lesson of give one instruction pause, see that they do it, go on.

My own demos are pretty good. there is observable action.

I am seeing things to correct/refine in students.

Things to work on:

1. I'm taking way too long getting people set up with their various props for the poses. I've got to streamline that process.

2. I need to get better at managing two different things at once, ie someone with their period while the rest of the class goes on to another non hut friendly pose.

3. More with giving sense of direction.

4. more with linking, do A to get B and notice the effect at C.

5. more consistent philosophical theme.

6. Keep my ponytail lower on my head, it was a little distracting flopping about on top of my head.

7. Watch turning out of the feet in backbends.

Anyway, it always strikes me in doing this process how much it is an opportunity for self-study. To observe yourself objectively. It is a good exercise in detachment also. Well, that's what happened, now learn from it. Practice teaching again, and again, and again.

off to do it again at 4:30.