Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Asana sequence, week 8, level 2-3

virasana, PYS II.4
amv/ams/uttanasana
supta padangusthasana, parivrtta
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana
ams/plank/chaturanga
vasisthasana
malasana
ekahasta bhujasana
akarna dhanurasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, halasana, ekapada, supta konasana
savasana

Saturday, March 22, 2008

UU Podcast and Jeremiah Wright

Apparently the First Unitarian Church records all their sermons. My talk last week can be heard at http://www.uumilwaukee.org/postings/category/guest-speakers

By the way, since Jeremiah Wright is so much in the press these days and has caused such intense controversy, the least people of open minds can do is give this man a chance to be heard. After all he has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and many other mainstream accolades , which is to say, he's no David Duke (a comparison I have heard). I heard him speak at New York's Riverside Church and he is brilliant and compassionate. Here is a link to his 9/11 sermon in its entirety. I found it powerful and truthful and listened to it twice.
http://essence.typepad.com/news/2008/03/listen-to-rev-j.html

Asana sequence, week 7, level 2-3

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana, ekapada
ams to parsvottanasana
ams to parivrtta trikonasana
prasarita padottanasana
uttanasana
wall utthita parsva hasta padangusthasana
parivrtta upavishta konasana
parivrtta janu sirsasana
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana, supta konasana, urdhva mukha paschimottanasana
savasana

Asana sequence, Level 1, Week 6

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana
ardha uttanasana, wall to virabhadrasana iii
supta padangusthasana i
vinyasa: tadasana, urdhva hastasana, virabhadrasana iii to chair, urdhva prasarita ekapadasana
adho mukha svanasana
upavishtha konasana
parsva uvk
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, ekapada, parsvaikapada, halasana, supta konasana
savasana

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

THE ARTS, PERSONAL PRACTICE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Some of you suggested I post the sermon I gave at First Unitarian Church on 16 March. Here it is:

When I was invited to serve as Milwaukee poet laureate by the public library two years ago, I had some misgivings. I sort of tried to talk my way out of it. You see, after 9/11, the deaths of my parents, and the intensity of graduate school, I’d made a conscious decision to put poetry on the back burner. I felt, frankly, that there were more important tasks at hand. The nation and the planet were in crisis and all hands were needed to elect a progressive president, fix the voting machines, counter fundamentalism, prevent war, and so much more. I didn’t want to isolate myself at my desk for 3 hours, slaving away at a poem, which IF I managed to get it published, might be read by 200 people, then forgotten. I wanted to be out on the street, with my people, making change from the ground up.

Of course we can argue that the making of art in and of itself is a radical act. But I wanted to be radical like Gandhi, like Emma Goldman, like Angela Davis. I wanted to participate in civil disobedience and get arrested with Code Pink. Not just write about it.

So what actually IS the relationship between the arts and social change? Can a song or a poem or a dance change society, change the world?

I believe the bridge between art and social change is personal practice. With those activities we engage in daily to challenge ourselves and to grow. Your personal practice might be a daily, mindful walk through your neighborhood or a park. It might be “morning pages,” writing in a journal upon waking. It might be meditation or prayer. It might be playing a musical instrument or singing. It might take 10 minutes or 2 hours. It almost doesn’t matter what the practice is, only that we do it consciously and commit ourselves to it. A personal practice takes us from the known to the unknown, the finite to the infinite, the secular to the sacred, the individual to the universal.

I love the notion of practice. Not accomplishment. Not performance, not publication, but just practice. One of my mentors, senior Iyengar yoga teacher Chris Saudek, tells us that in yoga class, there are 2 things one never needs to say. One is “thank you,” and the other is “I’m sorry.” You see, we’re just practicing. Of course all our attempts will be imperfect. There’s no place for pride nor shame. We’re just practicing, putting forth our best effort moment by moment, trying to stay alert and responsive.

Novelist Eudora Welty described how she approached her writing each day with neither hope nor dread. When we come to our practice freed from expectations and judgment, we enter the open realm of possibility. Here, then, is the fertile, generative place of personal transformation. Persian poet Rumi says,

"Out beyond wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about."

The field: that is our place of practice.

But how can my little practice: a few minutes of meditation, some breathing, doing a series of yoga postures, create social change?

Let me tell you a story. One of my favorite public radio programs, Radiolab, produced at WNYC, did a show on music. They told a story that may be familiar to you about Igor Stravinsky. When “The Rite of Spring” premiered in 1913 in Paris, the dissonance and polyrhythms, and the very modern choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky suggesting fertility rites literally drove the audience crazy. They actually had shouting matches and fistfights in the aisles and the performance degenerated into a riot. I’d heard this story many times as an example of how powerful and iconoclastic art can be.

What I hadn’t known was the follow-up to the story, which was that “The Rite of Spring” was performed one year later, again in Paris, and this time it was met with adulation, and Stravinsky was carried off on the shoulders of his adoring audience. What happened in a single year?

According to the neuroscientists interviewed on Radiolab, the auditory cortex, within that tumultuous year, had acclimated to dissonance. You see, when we experience something completely new and unexpected, the brain, which is essentially a conservative organ, doesn’t know how to process it, how to contextualize it. The brain “abhors the new,” as one scientist put it. When the neurons of the auditory cortex are overwhelmed, they start releasing dopamine. Dopamine in small quantities makes us happy. But too much dopamine will lead to schizophrenia. In that theater in Paris in 1913, the audience members had become biochemically insane. But within a year, the brain had learned this pattern, had begun to make sense of dissonance and asymmetric rhythms, had begun to appreciate and even enjoy it.

So from the perspective of the brain, the role of the artist is to disrupt the known, subvert the status quo, and stimulate us into new patterns of perception and understanding. We need art to jolt us, to startle us out of complacency, even to shock us. Art is far more than a place to rest the eyes or lull the ear. If we want our brains to continue developing, we need to expose ourselves to art that confuses us, that we may not find pleasant at first. Beauty is non-essentialist. That is to say, beauty cannot be taken out of context; beauty creates its own context. What is chaos and noise in 1913 is groundbreaking, beautiful music in 1914. By 1940, it’s children’s music, used in Disney’s Fantasia.

“That music is just noise.” “I could make a painting like that.” “Those dancers, they were just jumping around up there, I don’t know what they were doing.” Or in a yoga class, “That pose hurts. I don’t know what the purpose of that is,” or “Lift the kneecaps? What does that even mean, I don’t get it at all.” My friend and eurythmy teacher Mary Ruud advises us to savor those moments of feeling lost and confused. But if we stick with the new experience, the brain gets to work.

The brain starts to sort and analyze and understand the new pattern. Soon the brain leads us to experience the new art differently: “Hmmm, I kind of like how MIA layers different kinds of found sound and sings over that.” “When I sit in front of this Rothko painting, I can really experience the color and notice all its gradations.” Or in a yoga pose, “When I really turned my right thigh out and pressed my foot down I was able to balance and create quietness in my breath and in my mind.”

Isn’t this what it really means to be “open-minded”? On a neurological level, when we are engaged in our personal practice, when we challenge our brains with new experiences, when we expose ourselves to even disruptive or painful experiences like attending Stravinsky’s premier of “The Rite of Spring,” we educate our neurons and create new patterns and thus new understandings. As we literally and biochemically open our minds, don’t we open our hearts as well? We become more attentive and more aware and thus more sensitive to each other. A society comprised of such individuals would surely not leave anyone out in the cold, without adequate food or housing or healthcare. A society comprised of such individuals would not leave the important task of governing to corporations and the wealthy.

If you want a population you can manipulate, withdraw support for artists. Demolish social programs, don’t pay a living wage, deprive people of basic needs like healthcare. Eliminate all safety nets. Make people work overtime, 2 or more jobs, limit their free time. Without free time, we’re deprived of our practices. We don’t take walks, we don’t make music, we don’t do yoga, we don’t write poems, we don’t go to church.

When we are stressed-out, our practices dry up. In that state we seek the familiar and comfortable. We want predictable experiences because we’re already juggling so much. But this is when we need our personal practices the most, and when society needs art the most.

So let us make time everyday to engage in a meaningful personal practice. May we approach our lives as artists, ever growing and evolving. May our work as artists expand outward to build a healthier more compassionate society. May it be so.

Asana sequence, week 6, level 2-3

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha svanasana to parsvottanasana, parivrtta trikonasana
prasarita padottanasana
uttanasana
sirsasana, ekapada
upavista konasana
parsva uvk
parivrtta uvk
baddha konasana
parivrtta janu sirsasana
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
malasana
kurmasana
setubandha, block
sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana, supta konasana, urdhva mukha paschimottanasana
savasana

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Asana sequence, Monday, Level 2-3, 10 March

Patanjali yoga sutra II.2
adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana
supta padangusthasana i, parivrtta
adho mukha svanasana, heels wall, ekapada
virabhadrasana iii to urdhva prasarita ekapadasana, fingers to wall
utthita hasta padangusthasana, foot to wall
uhp, high rope
uhp, side to wall, holding foot
uttanasana
sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana
savasana

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Asana sequence, Saturday, 8 March Level 1, Week 4

adho mukha virasana
adho mukha svanasana, hands to wall
ams, hands on blocks, wall
urdhva mukha svanasana, as above
rope 1
rope standing backbend
standing backbend, head to wall
urdhva mukha svanasana
bhujangasana
salabhasana
makarasana
adho mukha virasana, parsva
ardha matsyendrasana
salamba sarvangasana, halasana
savasana


Wednesday's asana sequence

7pm Level 1, 5 March, Week 4

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
urdhva hastasana
trikonasana
ardha chandrasana
adho mukha svanasana/urdhva mukha svanasana
salabhasana
makarasana
ustrasana, ropes
adho mukha virasana, parsva
sarvangasana, halasana
savasana

Asana sequences, Friday, 7 March

9am Level 1, Week 5

adho mukha virasana
adho mukha svanasana
adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana low rope
trikonasana, wall, chair
parsvakonasana, wall chair
uttanasana, hips to wall
prasarita padottanasana, chair
supta baddha konasana
chair sarvangasana/setubandha bench menstr
viparita karani
savasana

Same for 11am Gentle Level 1, Week 5, except standing poses were with ropes.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Dhyana and spring

Most mornings, when I don't feel the pressure of the day bearing down on me, I sit down for a 23 minute meditation as soon as I arise. Chilly in the house, I keep my bathrobe on and slip into the warmest corner of the house and kneel on my balance cushion. I set the timer. Why 23 minutes? My watch has the annoying habit of beeping at the 3-minutes-remaining mark, and every 30 seconds thereafter. I figure 20 minutes of stillness is about what I can currently handle, and I use the remaining 3 minutes as transition time.

The past couple of weeks have brought some changes to my developing dhyana practice. It's always been cold and dark and silent as I sit, but now the sun is making its way through the clouds earlier, around 6:30am or so, instead of after 7am when I'm making my breakfast. Even more notable, our neighborhood cardinal is back, and I can hear his (I think the males sing this song) chirping accompanying my quiet breathing. Birds and sunlight, yes, spring is indeed coming, what a relief!

As my watch counts down its last 3 minutes, I switch from watching my breath or using a mantra to a more active "social" practice of meditation. I began this in India, sending pure unadulterated love and benevolence to my teacher, Geeta Iyengar. Since then I've added my family members to my "list" and I send them love, unconditional, infinite, benevolent. Malachi and Ed, still asleep. Katja in New York City in her triple dorm room on 5th Avenue. Meiko all the way in Bamako, Mali. It's a form of prayer, of holding someone in the light, as the Quakers say. I tack on others whom I know are needing support. By now my feet are starting to fall asleep and I know my sitting time is just about up. So is the sun now, and the cardinal has already moved on.

Asana sequence, Monday, Level 2-3, 3 March

PYS II.I
adho mukha svanasana, head support
uttanasana
rope sirsasana/supta virasana (small groups)
chair sarvangasana
viparita karani/viparita dandasana/bench setubandha (small groups)
savasana, bolster, ujjayi, viloma inhales
seated ujjayi with shoulder harness
seated ujjayi, digital closing inhales and exhales
savasana