Enlightening Nonsense

 

My Dad used to always say, “Pack your bag the night before.” As useful advice as that was, it started to get annoying when I would say, “Can you pass an apple?” and he’d respond, “Pack your bag the night before.” I solved the problem by never asking him for an apple. But as a man, I now see where he was coming from, about preparing yourself so you don’t have to futz around the day-of and only realize that you forgot to pack something when you are about to brush your teeth and then—SMACK! “Oh shoot, I forgot my magnetic water pik!”

It was getting close to the time when I was scheduled to teach my yoga class at the second annual Yoga & Raw Food Expo and my drummer, Lenny Hoops [http://www.myspace.com/lennyshoops], still hadn’t arrived. I sent him a text message and he texted me back that he was on his way. More time passed and now it was ten minutes to eight and my class was at 8:00. “Pack your bag the night before” kept replaying in my mind like a nagging Jewish mantra.

A few minutes later Lenny Hoops arrived and the bubble of carbon monoxidiacal drama that tends to surround me decided to envelope him and the closest humans nearby, as they all became casualties to the X-drama. But unlike “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” where being “X’ed” is met with laughs and “You son of a guns!” being X’ed by Swami X is akin to stepping in dog shit seconds before the most important job interview of your life and besides the smell and the worry, you find yourself flooded with confusion as to who in their right mind would let an unhousebroken Shitzu into the waiting area.

I had met Lenny Hoops in the subway, where he was jamming away with two djembes (African drums) between his legs and a partner playing some horn instrument, I believe…The last time I had two Africans between my legs got me the AIDS…He had a big crowd around him. I listened for a bit and grabbed his card.

As I started to walk away, he said to me, “I know what’s in that bag,” meaning the djembe I had over my shoulder. I told him that I taught yoga and would love him to come and play for one of my classes, to which he told me to call and leave him the information. I called him when I got home and left a message on his machine.

At 1:00 in the morning he called me back and said, “I can play for your 9:00 class tomorrow.” That was 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday. Rather than being like, “Dude, what the fuck are you calling this late?” I was like, “Right on!” And the rest was history. Well, not really any history that would be covered in the History textbooks in our controlled education as, believe it or not, a lot of important stuff was left out of those as well; when the winners right the books, the losers always look like, uh, losers.

I kept looking at my watch and in between thinking, “Pack your bag the night before,” I was trying to figure out how many minutes I had set it fast and justify that 7:55 was really like 7:51. And then he arrived and I was like, “PRAISE JESUS!” less so because I believe in the messianic fairytale and more just to stick it to my Jewish parents who had given me little more than a circumcised penis and the sage advice to “Pack your bag the night before.”

Lenny Hoops had come right from his Central Park, where he set up shop with his drums and twenty or so hula-hoops that always attracted a crowd of kids and adults, who hopefully not only had a great time enjoying the beats of his drumming and the movement of their hips but also had some green to help Lenny Hoops enjoy what all men do: crack whores, cocaine and cookies. Lenny Hoops was never aware that whenever I had come up to him and said hello in the park, that I had been hanging around for about ten minutes, as I loved watching Lenny Hoops share his love and talent with everyone.

Because he had just come from his “day job,” he had with him a huge cart and all the hula-hoops and his djembe…The last time I had an African on a cart, I was accused of slave-running…I opened one of the outer doors of The New Yorker Hotel and was struggling with the other door, trying to kick it open and hold it with my foot and missing the time when I was a slave owner in Africa and would just have to crack my whip and the door would be open.

The strange thing about this struggle was that there were two doormen standing about six feet away by the other door. Lenny Hoops had clearly had a long day and his mood might not have been, shall we say, cherry. He looked at the two doormen and said in a slightly snappy way, “Can you do your job and get the door?” I struggled some more and the doormen still didn’t move. I think one of them might have just started to move when Lenny Hoops said, “You know, forget it!” and he pulled open the other door and we managed to get through, the two doormen opening the inner doors to the hotel.

Lenny Hoops had some choice words to share with the Big Ron, a very big black man that had I had him back in the plantation days, I could have retired by age 30, instead of working my fingers to the bone every night—wait a sec, that’s not my story. After Lenny Hoops had called him some words like “Lazy” or “fat-ass,” he said something like, “You’ll never amount to anything but a doorman.” I was going to console Big Ron with, “Hey, my Mom would be relieved if I amounted to ‘just a doorman’, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” Okay, I couldn’t help going into my Marlon Brando from “On The Waterfront” there. But there wasn’t really any time and, besides, that prick didn’t get the door when it seemed like a blind man would have been able to tell that we were struggling. Of course those blind folk have that sonic bat sense and all, but still.

We went to the desk to check Lenny Hoops’ cart and the concierge there said that he couldn’t check it because Big Ron told him no-go. I went up to Big Ron and said, “Because of something that happened between you two, you’re gonna screw me?”

He said, “Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it.” That’s the typical bullshit response—of course there’s something you can do. You’re the one who made up the fake rule!

I said to him, “It’s not that you can’t, it’s that you won’t.” He repeated his sorry excuse, and it was a sorry ass excuse, and I turned to Lenny Hoops with a look like, “What the fu—? If you have to blow this guy, you blow him! I’m not going to be late for teaching my class!”

Lenny Hoops said to me, “Forget it,” and we took the cart with us into the elevator. While I generally find the Universe’s downpour of drama that it soaks me with daily somewhat amusing, I totally told the Universe that this was not cool in the elevator. For good measure I added, “Pack your bag the night before.”

We got to the class, I taught it, I was in flow and everyone had a good time. I looked over at Lenny Hoops and after an hour and fifteen minutes of drumming and listening to D.J. X spinning asanas, he looked pretty renewed.

The theme of the class was about yoga as “union,” which is one popular translation of the word. I won’t get into it now, but I used many different approaches to understanding “union” through the physical postures and in teachings between segments to explore how the microcosm of what we were playing in the classroom could apply to the bigger picture in the world outside of The Hotel New Yorker. There were laughs as we looked for flies in Lizard Pose or breadcrumbs in Pigeon Posture, the students bodies puffed up confidently as they embodied the warrior spirit during the Warrior Series, there were also nods of deep understanding and union, not just with the “concepts” and “philosophy,” but with the student facing the wrong way…me.

After class a few straphangers were around me and I shared a practical teaching with Lenny Hoops for not only Hoops’ benefit but for the students to get a real-world situation where yoga can be used besides to scratch that itch under your left thigh with your nose.

I shared the story of what had happened when my bubble of drama exploded at the entrance of The New Yorker Hotel and had infected Lenny Hoops and the two doormen. I said that the doormen didn’t know that Lenny Hoops had a long day. And perhaps they did, in fact, behave sub-optimally in their jobs. Maybe that was because they were incapable due to vaccines shot into their butts as infants that left them brain dead. Maybe it was because they were jerks. I went through the story how it had unraveled and raised the question on how we could have told the story a different way.

It seemed that Lenny Hoops got more for his money than just an unpaid gig way out of the way. His face seemed deep in reflection and I swear, if he opened his mouth and said, “Pack your bag the night before,” I would have probably thought it the most prolific shit I had ever heard. Instead he said, “You know, I think I’m gonna apologize to the doorman.”

This touched me very much. Not because I’m a non-violent pussy or think that we should all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but because to see a transformation in a person is one of the most beautiful things to behold, something that easily rivals the most gorgeous multi-colored sunset over a Hawaiian beach. This is yoga and this is teaching that I have to share and I felt blessed that I was honored with not only carrying the teaching like a mother ready to vaginally upchuck her little brat, but to also be witness to the fruits—regardless of whether Krishna said not to pay this no nevermind.

That next day I went to the front desk and complained to the manager about he concierge, as I had a flashback to last year where I was sitting in an abandoned stairwell meditating and was knocked abruptly like a pack of teenagers going wilding by a huge black security guard who I believed to be the same guy at the door! While I do believe in forgiveness, I also believe in holding people accountable for their actions, if not for my poor little hurt ego then at least so they won’t repeat the bad behavior they shared with me to someone else. The manager apologized and when I tried to weezle a free night’s stay at the hotel she told me to, “Get your Jew ass out of here!” I was going to file a sexual harassment complaint about her referencing my ass but figured she’s the manager—what would she do about it?

On Sunday night, after the Expo was all done and I was ready to vamoos, I saw Big Ron at the door again and feeling all “yogic” I thought I’d go up to him and explore. I said hi to him, told him my name and asked him for his. He said, “Why do you want to know?” He wasn’t entirely wrong. I did want to know so that if I chose to complain more I could say, “It was Ron, Ron! Ree, Ri, Ro, Ron!”

“Because I told you my name and I want to know who I’m talking with.”

“Ron.”

We talked about the situation and from Big Ron’s perspective, he thought we had the outer doors and he was holding the inside doors for us. And when Lenny Hoops pissed his words on his new shoes, while he didn’t shut the doors he was holding, he sure shut his cooperative spirit.

I told Big Ron how it appeared from Lenny Hoops and my perspective. I then told him how I had taught a yoga class with a theme of “union” and that this was such a perfect example of how because we each couldn’t get past our own perspectives and frustrations, what could have been an opportunity for union became a spear-chucking event (haven’t made a racist reference in a bit.) Ron’s smile and face was a beautiful Hawaiian rainbow for me to see, even if I had to put up with a serious thunderstorm in order to come to it. 

I told him the sharing of the incident I gave to a few students as well as Lenny Hoops at the end of the class and how Lenny Hoops had said how he wanted to come down and apologize to Big Ron. If Big Ron’s heart were made of chocolate it would have melted. He smiled softly and said, “You know, please tell him that I am sorry for what happened between us.” I told him I would.

I also found out that Big Ron wasn’t the rude security guard from last year that jarred me out of meditation almost as harshly as if I heard a zipper and then felt a thud on my shoulder. I was going to “make a correction” to the management, as I usually prefer to correct my wrongs, like when I sent out the email to everyone on my list with the video showing different groups of people placing three or four cel phones around some popcorn kernels and calling the phones and watching the popcorn pop from radiation that, “This proves that cel phones are unsafe,” only to find out that the whole thing was a P.R. gimmick for some company promoting something, I don’t know, easy popping popcorn, and so I wrote everyone back with my tail between my legs and said, “Uh, it was fake. Heh, heh. I still think cel phones are unsafe. Heh heh.”

I decided against it, as I had already left the hotel and I figured if they pulled Big Ron aside and said, “Did you hassle this hippie last year in the stairwell?” He’d say, “I’m at the door, bitch. Now how the hell would I pull that one off?” And he did do a shitty job of getting the door for us, even if he was a charming mother fornicator. If I see Big Ron on the street, homeless and jobless, and he says to me in tears, “Someone complained about me not getting the door for them and so they fired me,” I’ll probably come clean and tell him, “Lenny Hoops did it!”

Often in the yoga poser world of “spirituality,” as much as we recite like a babbling homeless man, “We are all One,” our actions are about jumping on whatever we can to prove ourselves not only separate from the idiots that surround us, but somehow better. Maybe if we accepted our brothers and sisters with all their faults and frailties and looked at self-realization as a process and not a goal, we would see every situation that didn’t fit in with “The World How It Would Be If I Was The Dictator God” as an opportunity for our growth, instead of an excuse to put someone else down, as a chance to know our brothers and ourselves better, rather than a chance to separate into our isolation chambers. Then and only then will “We are all One” come to mean something more than that we’re a parrot wanting a spiritual cracker. When that day comes, I will rejoice. Less so because finally love will rule the planet but because I can finally drop the ever-annoying, “Pack your bag the night before” mantra.

 

REFLECTION AND MEDITATION:

Think of a time when you had a conflict with another, especially where you felt justified. Reflect on how you handled the situation. Imagine you “winning” the argument (there are really no winners when we fight—except in the sport of boxing but that’s a totally different situation.) How do you feel? Pretty good right? But notice how that feeling is almost an “angry high.”

Now imagine the same situation and instead of seeing how you can slam this “other” and prove to them what a moron they are, you instead say, “You know, what the heck are we doing here? I see your point and while I may have a different view than yours, I rather us find a connection and an understanding than be in conflict with each other.” Imagine the other person’s anger immediately melting and them saying, “You know, you’re right. This whole thing is silly. I’m sorry if I offended you.” You apologize for your share of the conflict and you share a smile or a handshake, or even a hug. How do you feel now? Notice how this feeling is different than the “angry high” from before.

Despite what we have been taught, that “You have to fight to survive!” and “Only the strongest will rise!” and “You have to beat the competition!” there is another way. Our natural way is one of cooperation and “union.” When we come to this understanding, the “other” is no longer other but “Self.” And the feeling of union is more beautiful than a gorgeous Hawaiian sunset. No need to “Pack your bag the night before.” You’re not going anywhere…you are at home.