Sivananda Yoga Ranch; Upstate NY

Today is my last full day at the Sivananda Yoga Ranch (near Woodbourne, NY) where I am profoundly grateful to be spending five days after visiting Eva in Rochester. I was disappointed to find that this is not actually a ranch; i.e. there are no animals being raised here, unless that is supposed to be some sort of spiritual metaphor for the folks attending workshops or doing teacher training. It's possible. It is a fascinating place for me to be, because my interest in Vedantic philosophy and Hinduism is purely academic, by which I mean I have been chanting mostly insincerely these past few days. But I do enjoy chanting, and harmoniums, and thus, here we are. Chanting with harmoniums. 

I didn't do my teacher training here because I would abhor worshipping a false idol or whatever for a whole month (by which I mean I am ambivalent about the existence of God), but I can dig a long weekend. I like the energy that chanting produces. I am a believer in Science, and the law of conservation of energy tells me that this chanting is likely to produce Positive Vibes Somewhere.  I can hare krishna with the best of them as long as I get a good cocktail afterwards.

 

Daily, it's four hours of hatha yoga physical practice, which I make sure I always do, despite feeling like a jello person by day 4. Sometimes there is also a 2 hour yoga nidra session, or guided meditation, which is particularly effective for mitigating the impacts of trauma or chronic stress, the topic of the workshop for which I'm here. There's also karma yoga, during which you can garden or clean things or whatever is helpful. There's also 2 two hour satsongs - - silent meditation combined with a lecture on a (usually spiritual in some way) topic of interest. Example: the difference between 'being nice' and 'being kind.' The value of service. And so on. I usually go in the evening but skip the morning because sorry, I have Murakami books to read. The meals are all vegetarian and delicious although some inexplicable ingredient among them is making me break out. A lot of oil, maybe? The mind boggles. Gorgeous plants everywhere, of course, and a pond for swimming. Hard to argue with. Caterpillars have fallen on my head a few times and I think I brushed a brown recluse off of my leg earlier, and but that's nature for you. There's also a wasp on my keyboard. It's fine! It's fine.

I came here to compare this location with the Sivananda Bahamas Center as I try to identify Homes Away From Home in my life, and unfortunately it just wasn't quite up to snuff, to be completely honest. I adore it, but there's not enough boats and not enough ocean. These are problems implicit with the Catskills about which they can do nothing. I suspect Yogaville will be much the same way in Virginia...but that is next on my list to try. A cicada landed on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye earlier, which is a Good Omen. I am in the right place.

The other reason I came was for the Post Traumatic Growth workshop to which I alluded earlier, which was led by Molly Birkholm, who is a boss (check out her iRest Yoga Nidra program if you're into this sort of thing.) I did this because I would love to eventually volunteer teach some classes through the Wounded Warriors program or something similar, and she provided some super valuable feedback on how to adapt poses (asanas), to accommodate those working through traumatic experiences or chronic stress, which impact the brain and neural pathways in the same way, interestingly enough. The medical studies they have done indicate that there can be real, significant change to the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex (i.e. shifts in size and functional to a per-traumatic state) over the course of just 6 - 10 weeks, which is pretty neat. I'll probably write another post dealing more directly with some of my thoughts regarding what I learned, but suffice to say, meditative time and developing a more robust mind-body connecting has an enormous impact on quality of life for most people...it would be nice to be able to make these practices more accessible to them. Without all of the dogma and doctrine of Sivananda institutes. Although boy, is it pretty! But yeah, doctrine. It's a mixed bag. And my shoulders are killing me from all of these headstands. BECAUSE. I CAN DO. HEADSTANDS NOW.

Yoga is, at it's core, a practice of deep listening. And doing really dope-looking postures. Sorry not sorry, Sivananda. I am also celebrating the dope poses.

Reunion

I have not posted in two years, and here we are. Upstate New York, no photos to speak of to contribute to this historically travel-oriented blog. A naked, unadorned post. I thought of this space last week because I was editing some tragically neglected photos of Ireland, and so I've allowed myself an hour to free-write in it. I always find it funny when folks apologize for their blogs—I’m sorry I haven’t posted, I’m sorry this is off-topic, I’m sorry to my adoring public for the vanity of these overtures, etc. I come here with palms open; little sense of what I seek to provide aside from rambling, some recent thought patterns. I am working on a book, and maybe I believe that if I reinvigorate aspects of this space, they will manifest into a passionate editor and a captive audience.

I think a lot about the act of writing and what I should want to derive from it. I know it means an incredible amount to me as a process. I struggle with how that actually translates into a form or into a body. The act of writing feels to me like sculpting a very intimate self-portrait in play-doh. Some absurd color. Non-toxic. It translates into a physical, tangible process. I find myself utterly consumed by how the process of living manifests into a product -- the process of building a home on your back, like a snail. What the body includes or what it evokes or what is then, in turn, excluded/expelled. When I write, I want to visually capitalize the operative words. I have to restrain myself from doing it. The reader should know the emphasis based on other, less juvenile cues. Right? Bueller?

Sometimes I am obsessed with aesthetics because of their proximity to the body, and how that can make those seemingly innocuous decisions vital indicators of authenticity. Other times, I am utterly disgusted by aesthetics based on how quickly they can shift and be transformed into a vapid estimation of personhood. Does clothing matter, given that it can be purchased, it requires nothing of you beyond acquiescence, it is completely transitive? Or is it one of only very few things that matters, in the sense that it presents you to the else-space? It’s pressed against your skin for the majority of the day? That’s a near-impossible standard for a significant other, and yet my clothes meet and exceed it daily. Should I be impressed? What is the output of all of this effort and personal intention? Is it accumulating slowly into a vat of identity, or is it sliding into the void like expired pudding?

Does writing matter because I identify myself as a writer and I am justifying the person I believe myself to be? My actions in life are motivated by the extent to which I think they make me interesting and could possibly result in a Good Story; the thing that produces Maximum Comedy (thanks, Eric, for that one.) Is the writing the act of documentation, or the process of concocting the narrative? Am I a storyteller, am I the story, is there a difference in a profound sense between the two?

I think often about a conversation a friend and I had at Barnside--a classic, divey, diner--once upon a time in high school. He was discussing his desire to become a writer ("Writer"), and struggling with whether he should be constructing his magnum opus then, at that moment, or should feel no rush in an effort to collect as much narrative expertise and life ("Life") between then and when the work would eventually be written. His preference at the time was the latter. I was not sure what to suggest. I am still not sure what to suggest. I am unsure of if I write fiction or nonfiction. I know what other people experience, but on some basic level I question their assertions and doubt the basic tenants of a commonly-experienced reality. Does this make me an extremely highly-functioning schizophrenic? I don’t say that facetiously. It alludes to the incredible bias and politic associated with the labeling of social behaviors, something I think most artists should care about more than it seems they do. But I digress. Constantly.

Most of what I experience on a daily basis could never be written about with any detailed content included because it is highly classified. And largely depressing. But I adore my work because it teaches me about people. I don’t want to understand numbers or data. I want to understand people and the events that they produce, because it is what interests me. Traveling interests me because it presents me with different kinds of people to deconstruct. I have this profound self-assurance that gathering stories about people is what I am supposed to be doing. I am gathering facts and figures and storing them for…something. To what end? What if I die tomorrow? How do you negotiate between compiling the art and displaying the art? Do I alternate daily? Weekly? Yearly? That is rhetorical. Does that make it useless?

IS THIS EXERCISE THE TREE FALLING IN THE FOREST?

If you take nothing else actionable from reading this post, recognize that you should read Murakami's IQ84 afterward, if you have not already. I do not want your efforts in reading this to feel unjustified. Cafe Sasso is a very nice coffee shop in Rochester, and so I will also recommend your patronage, because you have gotten this far. I wrote a nice poem about convergent evolution this morning. I also fully acknowledged to myself that the fatal error in my manuscript is an unreliable -- almost incalculable -- relationship between the protagonist and their environment. It occurs to me that it is difficult to become attached to such a person.

At times like this, you remember that there is no disassociating the voice from the vocal chord.