Archive for May, 2009

Yoga Perv

Friday, May 8th, 2009

There is a website called meetup.com where regardless of your interest, you can find others in your area with a similar interest who are ready to “meet up.” The first one I attended was a Vegetarian Meet-Up, where I shared a meal with other vegetarians. One guy there was also in a Dungeons & Dragons Meet-Up, a Microsoft Word Meet-up and many other groups; I kind of shut off when I heard “Microsoft Word,” thinking this guy way to nerdy to warrant more of my ear-time.

The next Meet-Up I attended was a Vegan Meet-Up and I liked this one a little more than the first. Many people are vegetarians because they think it is good for health but most vegans are there, at least in part, because they don’t think wacking animals for their taste buds is a compassionate choice. I was pretty active in animal rights at the time and dug the fact that we could discuss how chickens were being cruelly treated while passing the soy chicken nuggets around, acknowledging that those little cluckers sure did taste good, though!

I started my own Meet-Up group called “Yoga Without Walls” (http://yoga.meetup.com/758), where the concept was not just about doing yoga outside, but also working to take the principles of yoga out of the classroom and into our lives. Seriously, what is the point of being all mellow-yellow after you wake-up from corpse pose only to start bitching and moaning when the first person you bump into on the street doesn’t bow their head and give you the yoga cult nod of “Namaste”?

Right now 182 people are signed-up as members of my group, which really means little as, just like a gym membership, most people sign-up and never show up (but with the Meet-Up they don’t have to pay to sign-up, so you can imagine how “obligated” they feel to even RSVP.) Whenever a new member signs-up, I receive an email and I usually do the same thing: I check out their picture and see if I’d like to fuck them and then I see what other groups they’re a member of to see what kind of nonsense I’ll have to talk about in order to get them into bed. So when Allen joined up, I followed my same modus operandi.

After 10-minutes of staring at his profile picture, I decided I didn’t want to fuck him. I then went on to his back office picture and was surprised, as it looked more like a “back door” picture than a back office one to me. It was hard to fully discern of what it was, but it looked like a somewhat closely cropped picture of the naked hips of one man behind another man wearing somewhat girlie underwear in a sort of anally suggestive way, shall we say.

I’m reminded of a seller on eBay about which a friend of mine who sells stuff on that site told me. He said this seller was known to have his naked reflection “accidentally” appear in the pictures of the items he was selling. It could be a fancy piece of glassware…but if you looked close you could see a nude man with a dangling wiener in the background.

Now I don’t mind what anyone does on their own time in their own space. Lord knows I myself have a couple of dozen pictures of me swinging from a chandelier with a sponge mop hanging out of my ass. But I don’t post them to public sites (besides www.spongemopintheass.com, of course.)

So I contacted Allen and inquired, “Uh hi. What is that second picture you posted of?” I didn’t receive a response but the next time I went to my Meet-Up site, I saw he had removed the picture in question, which only made me think that it was, indeed, of the homoerotic genre.

Because I’m a pain in the ass, I emailed Allen back and said, “I see you deleted the picture but I still want to know what it was.” Allen didn’t respond and days later I received notice in my mailbox that he had dropped out of the group.

Perhaps he was afraid that I would give him an assist during downward dog and whisper in his ear, “You can do this position in your girlie panties at home, fruity pants.” Truthfully, this wouldn’t be so out of the norm for me, as I say this to every one of my students when they’re in downward dog. 

Soggy Socks

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

I am getting back into running and decided to go for a run around the big loop of Central Park with my dog, which is about six miles, which is probably more distance than I should be doing at this stage of the game but moderation is for pussies. When I left my apartment is was so beautiful out, with the sun was shining down her welcoming warmth, that I turned right around and went back inside to lose my sweatpants and run in just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. And we were off…take two.

At the park, I took off my shirt, seeking that refreshing feeling of the wind against my skin during my run. Sometimes I think people are just trying to show off their bodies when they do this but I was more into the sensual than the egotistical today. And we were off…

About two miles into the run, a gang of clouds formed a West Side Story formation and told the sun to “Be a girl and get outa here!” and she did. Another mile into the run and the downpour began.

Now this was not just a slight drizzle or even a “Dude, it’s starting to come down”—this was a serious downpour. And I was totally grooving on it! I was in total “cup half-full” mode: “Look at the freedom of this—I don’t have to avoid any puddles now, as my sneaks and socks are totally soaked. Awesome! And I won’t need to take a shower when I get home. Nice!”

There were a couple of seriously loud thunder strikes that put my mind into reflection on the whether I would like the opportunity to go through the Dannion Brinkley Experience and be hit by lightning and die and come back to tell about it. I thought it would be pretty cool and all, getting a first-hand glimpse of the other side. I then thought how it would probably sizzle my hair off and I would be bald when I gave my presentation at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo at the end of the month and how my head is a battleground of scars from childhood falls, kickboxing bangs and illegal backroom abortions and that this would probably not be a pretty sight. The deciding factor that made me “Just Say No” to a lightning strike was that I don’t have any health insurance and if the financial burden didn’t kill me, my loving sister certainly would with her, “You know, that is totally selfish of you getting struck by lightning—the family had to pay for your hospital bill!” “Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”

So was my glee an example of enlightened behavior, that not even a soaking from the Jets and Sharks of the sky could dampen my mood? There was another time a few years back where I was with a girl in the park and it started raining pretty hard. She was smiling away, enjoying it all, and I was totally not digging it. “Oh, you’ve come so far, Swami X!” you say.

While I might agree that a truly enlightened master wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if he got caught in a storm (rumor has it those cheap bastards have at least twenty rat’s asses in their robes at all times and rarely give any of them up for anything), what’s more important than smiling your way through a sticky situation is to be authentic to what you are really feeling.

The yoga poser will laugh on the outside, because he has heard that one who is enlightened should not be bothered by such trivia and he doesn’t concern himself with the question, “Who Am I?” he focuses more on “Who can I copy?” while on the inside he is thinking, “Jees, I am wet and miserable and I am not even at Great Adventure!” It would be more authentic of him if he had the balls to say, “I am not happy here at all.”

But forgetting the ideal of being authentic in any given moment, which yeah, I suppose is important, I found it interesting to note that while I was unhappy the last time I was caught in the rain and my panties got wetter than when I saw that Brad Pitte movie where he showed a little side butt, today I was overjoyed, splashing away with my soggy socks. This clarified to me that WE DECIDE how we want to experience life and each of her many outpourings.

One person loses a client and goes into depression, thinking that his self-worth has been reflected as poor. Another person says, “Fuck him, he was a prick anyway.” One person loses her job and goes home and starts taking swigs from the Drano bottle. Another person says, “This will give me more time to focus on my true passion—needlepoint!” One person gets in an argument with her significant other and says, “Sayonara.” Another person gets in an argument with his significant other and says, “How can we improve what isn’t working?”

You can quote whatever “sacred” text you want, whatever religious dogma you follow, whatever book you’ve read, whatever metaphysical “expert” you saw speak at the last workshop you attended, about whether everything is written, preordained, contracted, planned, destined, karma—but I’m here to tell you, whether any of that is true or not, that there is plenty of wiggle room in how you choose to experience your life. But that would mean that you are responsible for the downer life you have created and who wants to hear that.

Take a run in the rain and see how it feels. If you’re miserable reflect on why? “I’m uncomfortable.” Sounds fair enough but dig deeper: what makes you uncomfortable? Soggy socks really aren’t that bad. It’s our immediate comparison to how they “should” feel that does.

And that is the answer to why we are suffering: because things don’t occur how we think they should. Think about it—this is the answer to every woe. “She was only five years old. She shouldn’t have died.” Says who? “That son of a bitch fired me!” Who says you were supposed to work there another day? “I stopped feeling the same way.” And that means…whatever you decide with your mind it means.

Gandhi said we have to be the change we want to see in the world. Forget being the change—let’s choose to be the Be-ing we want to be in the world. “Be all you can be,” to borrow a phrase from the Army. Not every day is sunshine, so then what—are you only going to BE shiny on those days? Why not commit to being more than just a fair-weather human. The choice is yours. The responsibility is yours. Your socks will dry. When you are more concerned about your life getting soggy than your socks, then you will start to live as a BE-ing.

“Every moment of your life there is a choice…if conscious. If you are unconscious then you let the world push you around.”

—Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

 

“Welcome to my morning

welcome to my day

I’m the one responsible

made it just this way…

I think I made it perfectly

I wouldn’t change a thing.”

—John Denver, “Welcome To My Morning” (Farewell Adromeda)

Unconditional

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

If you couldn’t see me as often as I’d like

If you said something that hurt me to the core

If you would no longer make love with me

If you told me you were intimate with another man

If you gained a hundred pounds, lost your hair and your teeth fell out

If you became mute and we could no longer share words

If you became crippled and we could no longer share walks

            arms around each other

            your body pressed tightly into mine

If you lost your hearing and couldn’t listen to my endless stories

If you lost your sight and couldn’t look into my devoted eyes

If you lost control of your body

            and I had to take care of you like a baby

If you lost your mind and no longer recognized me

If you told me you no longer cared

Even if my own heart went numb

            and I no longer felt anything magical

It wouldn’t matter

            Because I love you

                           Unconditionally