I haven’t written a thing in this blog-space since last year on December 29^th. There are a host of reasons why. So I’m beginning again today (my 58^th birthday). My wish is to pick up a bit where I left off and relate to my last post. But more importantly it’s to move forward with a project I’m calling ‘Ugly Yoga’.

Last year was full of personal and economic challenges … never mind the larger political chaos (which thankfully has resolved into an Obama win!). Like so many others during the last year my work began to feel the affects of tightened cash flow, downsizing and decreasing clientele. I made adjustments by pulling back on continuing education, advertising and personal expenditures. At the same time, almost subconsciously, I began a kind of retreat, a going inwards and shutting down. Not exactly lethargy with the world but something akin to it. I found myself questioning all of my life’s purposes and chosen directions. I was in a state of confusion and doubt. I felt totally uninspired and unable to breathe and without motivation.

Then in March of 08 my partner and I invited two darling, lovely Husky puppies into our home. Darby, a female and Connor, a male have been lifesavers in real terms. There is something so grounding and affirming to bond with and care for creatures not of human culture and human world knowing. Their presence is more primal and of a larger context. They have literally taken most of my partner’s and my ‘free’ time (hiking, running, walks, play-time, grooming, cleaning up puke, emergency vet visits, cleaning up shit, removing ticks, feeding, cuddling, more playing, nibbled on, slobbered on, licked and enjoying a sort of unconditional loving). I’ve found over the few short months of their lives that I’ve revisited many of the same shifts and paradoxes that occurred to me when my son was only a wee tike.

It’s so affirming to simply ‘be’ with them and share in their joy of play and discovery. They are 10 months old now still very puppy-like but mostly wolfish looking adults. My dogs have given me renewed perspectives and heightened awareness from sharing in their development. Overall they are reeducating me to what’s really important in life, love and companionship.

Through participation in their unfolding lives I’m having a re-education of my body … my mind and spirit come along for the ride. As it happens to me this is real yoga. Not yoga of constant, constrained, vigilant practice, strict discipline, detached omniscient witnessing, body twisting, breath restraining, or learning a new language. It is yoga that honors the stuff my body already knows. This isn’t adopting a set of Eastern philosophical beliefs that are nearly as convoluted at those of my northern-European dominator forbearers. This isn’t studying ancient texts that are as dusty and debated as any Judeo/Christian/Muslim European philosophies. This yoga wishes not to create performance anxiety, induce extreme self-consciousness, place a demand to please others, or ignore pain to look good. This isn’t pretty yoga, celebrity yoga or even correct yoga … this is real yoga …Ugly Yoga.

Many will say I’m being cynical to approach real yoga as an ugly practice. I’ve been accused of being a cynic once or twice before and so it’s appropriate (given that I’m being re-educated by dogs) to mention the source of the Cynic philosophy. My Ugly Yoga project has a good deal of resonance with those origins.

The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412-c. 323 B.C.) was perhaps the most well known Cynic. Diogenes was called Kynos  – Greek for dog – for his lifestyle and contrariness (he actually lived in an empty barrel in public with the dogs of the streets as friends and teachers). It is from the ancient Greek word for dog that we get the word Cynic. Loosely the main principles of Cynic philosophy (Cynicism) were (are?): Practicing a life of general self-sufficiency, Living by personal example, Examining falsehoods of conventional thinking, Inquiring after value, vice and conceit and Living according to personal, subjective, lessons of Nature (sort of dog like).

An astounding essay by the activist poet Paula Gunn Allen speaks volumes to where I’m headed with this notion of Ugly Yoga. It’s about being real and the uglier the better:

“In the United States, where milk and honey cost little enough, where private serenity is prized above all things by the wealthy, privileged, and well-washed, where tension, intensity, passion, and the concomitant loss of self-possession are detested, the idea that your attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis your body are your politics and your spirituality may seem strange. Moreover, when I suggest that passion – whether it be emotional, muscular, sexual, or intellectual – is spirituality, the idea might seem even stranger. In the United States of the privileged, going to ashrams and centers to meditate on how to be in one’s immediate experience, on how to be successful at serenity when the entire planet is overwrought, tense, far indeed from serene, the idea that connected spirituality consists in accepting overwroughtness, tension, yes, and violence, may seem not only strange but downright dangerous. The patriarchs have long taught the Western peoples that violence is sin, that tension is the opposite of spiritual life, that the overwrought are denied enlightenment. But we must remember that those who preached and taught serenity and peacefulness were teaching the oppressed how to act – docile slaves who deeply accept their place and do not recognize that in their anguish lies also their redemption, their liberation, are not likely to disturb the tranquility of the ruling class. Members of the ruling class are, of course, utterly tranquil. Why not? As long as those upon whose labor and pain their serenity rests don’t upset the apple cart, as long as they can make the rules for human behavior – in its inner as well as its outer dimension – they can be tranquil indeed and can focus their attention on reaching nirvanic bliss, transcendence, or divine peace and love.”**

My Ugly Yoga project has a real temper and a ribald sense of humor. It has no use for one dimensional ruling class tranquility.

The word ‘ugly’ comes from Old Norse, uggligr, and means to be dreaded or in some instances revered. Dread and revere both imply a healthy fear of unknown consequences attached to presumed apprehension. The word ‘yoga’ is from Sanskrit and literally means union or yoke. Union implies duality. How about a union of ugly with beautiful? I imagine that many folks hold an image of yoga in the U. S. as some sort of calisthenics body-beautiful, gym regimen. Or as glorified body-mind healing exercises done in a ‘yoga studio’ with a bunch of new age spiritual crap thrown in. I know that many folks feel they are too old, too out-of-shape, or too ugly to do yoga. Yet I’m certain that these same folks who hold these images intuit that at some level yoga is really about a personal immersion and union for, ‘my-body, my-mind and my-spirit’. Ugly Yoga is for them.

I believe a good many of us in the U.S. are deeply polarized pretty much 24/7 about how to relate to light/dark, male/female, good/bad, ugly/beautiful, mind/body, eros/spirit, happy/sad, comfortable/disturbed, dread/contentment, sacred/profane, life/death, union/division, left/right, right/wrong and on and on ad nauseum. Ugly Yoga is about a visceral awareness of this confusion. And it’s about honoring and accepting overwroughtness as, ‘my-overwroughtness’ brought on by trying to ‘be’ one way or another. Ugly Yoga teaches that both are required. Ugly Yoga is a practice for real bodies and beautiful minds.

I know from personal experience allowing my feelings to tip into that space where I’m always wrong (and never right) and shouldn’t even try leads to a downward unhappy spiral of complacency and dullness. I’m not advocating going down the straight and narrow or rejecting everything and only doing crooked and wide. On the contrary I’m suggesting that Ugly Yoga is about discovering that opposites require each other to exist.

So … Ugly Yoga is about becoming more comfortable with discomfort, ambiguity and paradox. It’s about imperfect alignment in service of discovering one’s real body and ways to explore more union of body, mind, spirit that are true for each unique person. As a mid-lifer myself I’m acutely aware of limitations (growing daily) requiring clever ways to compensate to still enjoy each day. My dogs are excellent teachers … downward and upward dog are not about looking pretty at all. They’re about feeling into that transition space where ugly is beautiful. Ugly Yoga is about forgiving myself for lapses in practice and then discovering that there are lessons to be learned and wisdom to be found through acceptance of myself as imperfect. The paradox is of course that there is no perfect without imperfection. If anyone reading this is interested in joining me … I’m beginning to teach/practice/learn/share my irreverent Ugly Yoga starting now.

**

The Woman I Love Is a Planet; the Planet I Love Is a Tree

by Paula Gunn Allen

from The Sweet Breathing of Plants, Women Writing on the Green World, edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson, North Point Press, New York, 2001.

This is my last blog entry for 2007. It’s a bit of a stream-of-consciousness and maybe isn’t as rational or well thought out at it could be. But it’s well in keeping with my theme of Misrule.

There’s so much terrible stuff out in the world today (and with it I find some terrible stuff in my inner world too). Today I’m overwhelmed with sadness for what we (and me) have collectively wrought as a species on this planet. There’s so much pain and misery about. Legions of good people are writing and speaking about this stuff. More than I could possibly read or hear. However, I believe Margaret Wheatley, the author of Leadership and the New Science nails the issues and possible solutions in this article:

http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/Self-OrganizedNetworks.pdf

It should be a ‘must-read’ by all.

The end of December 2007 is almost here and I find I’m feeling the effects of more paranoia, more fear and more hostility that ever I’ve felt before. Every time I look or listen some new disaster or atrocity has happened. The world seems totally crazy and on the verge of disaster. Or is it? Maybe this is not the ‘reality’ of the world at all (read were-eld, as in age of man). Maybe this is only how I’ve come to ‘see’ it as part of a complex manipulated view set forth like bait for me to swallow. I’m not going to play the blame-game here for I know that at some level I’m complicit in this manipulation. I know that larger forces are at work in the maintenance of my worldview. But once I willingly swallow the bait I can see how easily I’m then fed a continued feast of more and more fear, paranoia and hostility.

There are truly huge and horrific problems in our collective world today. I wouldn’t deny or make little of them at all. But how I behave and comport myself with the full weight of this knowledge is up to me.

I’ve decided with help from family and friends (old and new alike) to NOT take the bait this year and in fact to regurgitate as much of the foul stuff from 2007 as I can before the New Year turns.

In ancient times some of our ancestors recognized the impacts of a years worth of swallowed bait and when the Winter Solstice season began there were traditions designed to deal with the bait. Our ancestors did this by intentionally turning status quo daily behaviors and rules upside down and inside out. It was a celebration of reversal and revivification. They did ceremonies to embrace life and to dispel the accumulated darkness of the previous year.

Gazing with this lens of awareness it’s important for me to launch into the New Year with some realizations about how I can best resist the coming flood of bait. I want to be reminded that there is the possibility of a different set of directions forward. Directions that embrace life in positive life affirming ways, that recognize that we all have X chromosomes (male and female alike) and that to honor the feminine and masculine principles we must see they are mutually supportive of self-nurturance and co-nurturance. I want to be reminded that there is this gorgeous moment of infinite space between the Old Year and the New Year where we have the choice to move our collective humanity forward carrying that which is best in all of us and discarding that which no longer serves us well. I need to be reminded that this relationship of mutuality is what nature has to teach.

So I hereby rekindle a bit of irreverence from the ancestors who at this darkest time of year proclaimed a period of Misrule.

The Knell of Inbetweenness hath been struck,

The Bell of MISRULE soundeth;

Reverberating the Thirteen Angles,

Echoing through the Nine Spheres,

Rousing the Deep Ones from the starry Abyss of

   UR-KHAOS.

Exalted be the Gaurdians of the Dolmen,

En-chanted be the Word Unspeakable,

The Signacula of MISRULE at the Gap betwixt the

  ~Times

Amid grey mist and gloaming I rown,

Through the hoary Stile of Stone,

Through the whispering World-Hedge.

O King of Misrule, who art the World’s Upturner,

O Goat of Saturnus, whose Law is Perpetual

Revolt,

O Divine Fool, Overthrower of the Profane

Kingdom,

Destroying and Creating All in the Rite of the

Great Reversal!

Thine are the Uprais’d Horns,

Thine is the Wisdom of Lust,

Thine are the Red-Ochred Bones,

Thine is the Graveyard Dust.

                        Masks of Misrule, Nigel Jackson

The custom(s) of Misrule are diverse from cultures around the world. However, they all seem to remember that what we co-create as our daily culture and society is mostly a veil of ‘between-ness’, from what we wish to see, to what actually is and to what we could be with true clarity and humanity.

Michael Bronski puts it this way in his book, The Pleasure Principle, “When Misrule remains contained, it operates as a safety valve releasing the tensions that accumulate when people–either voluntarily following the rules of civilization, or forcibly kept in line by the power structures of the their society–cannot experience the freedoms and pleasures they seek. But the threat of contained Misrule is that the limited freedom it offers may alert individuals and groups to what they are missing and encourage them to seek it in their everyday lives. Controlled Misrule may grant a temporary relief of frustration, but it also challenges the status quo and provides people with the possibility of new visions and new freedoms. As such, it has the potential to radically change and restructure society.”

And Genia Pauli Haddon says something resonant in her book, Uniting Sex, Self & Spirit, “The stories we tell ourselves about the nature of life and the world (whether fairy tales, religious myths, personal life scripts, scientific principles and paradigms, or psychological theories) not only reflect our current views, but also shape our evolving consciousness. To envision that the Great Feminine principle, like the womb, has both gestative and exertive attributes helps women and men to recognize and value womanly assertiveness as a ‘feminine’ virtue and become able to distinguish between an animus-possessed woman who is “wearing the pants” and a fully feminine woman who knows how to “push from her womb” as well as how to nurture. To literally “re-member” that the Great Masculine principle has testicular as well as phallic attributes helps men and women appreciate ‘as masculine’ the supportive, patient, faithful attributes of the masculine principle, instead of labeling them feminine or effeminate. These realizations promote deeper self-understanding and call into question established cultural values, preparing the way for new cultural patterns and even images of God.”

Let me make a wish that the New Year comes forth with these ideas circulating ever more widely and with more humanity for all of us.