Enlightening Nonsense

I hadn’t taught a yoga class in awhile and had scheduled a class for my meet-up called “Yoga Without Walls” on a Saturday in Central Park. I was to meet those who were going to attend at Bethesda Fountain at 11:00. It was a beautiful day, sunny yet mild in temperature but when 11:15 rolled around it was just me and my dog Abandon sitting there and so I decided to go to a nearby field and meditate.

I was getting into my meditation when I felt someone sit down somewhat next to me. I opened my eyes and it was J.D., who had RSVP’ed that he might be able to make it. I was feeling pretty good from my meditation and at this point just wanted to stay in my zone and not teach. But what could I do?

First thing, J.D. started in how he was there at 11:00 and where was I? I was immediately immersed into a pond of “fuck you” and wanted to pull this annoying idiot down below the surface and drown him. I said, “J.D., you emailed me that you would try to come. I sat there from about 10:55 until 11:15 and saw no one so I left. What more could I have done?”

He told me that a month earlier I had said that we would meet on the side of the fountain and I was apparently at the front of the fountain. As if his annoyingness wasn’t tasty enough, he added some bullshit to his horseshit sundae and as any confection artist knows, you never mix your shits in the same meal. “I’m not blaming you, I just was trying to clarify.” No, bitch, you were blaming me. I told him that if he would shut the fuck up, I would give him a private session—something for which I charge $105/hour.

I had found the spot where I was sitting pretty peaceful, that was, before he pissed all over it with his, “Not blaming, just blaming” crap and suggested we set up shop and begin. J.D. said that he didn’t like this particular area, complaining that it seemed too “public” (uh, we’re in a friggin’ park!) and that he’d be self-conscious of people watching him. “Get over it,” didn’t come to mouth, although it definitely came to mind.

I was on edge of telling him that I was just going to go home and knew better than to get into an argument for it would inevitably lead to me calling him a fuckin’ asshole and although I consider myself a non-traditional yoga instructor, I still think opening a class calling a student a “fuckin’ asshole” is a bit off; well, let’s just say, I haven’t figured out how to make it work for me yet. We moved a little and finally J.D. let me take the helm for the class.

I came prepared with a certain theme for the yoga class, which is usually the only preparation I do, but as happens when you are in the flow, often you have to scrap your plans and go with what the Universe provides. I’m reminded of one yoga hike at a State Park in which I was the instructor. I had “planned” to hold positions really long and guide everyone in feeling a connection with nature. It was so windy and cold that I had to scrap that plan from the getgo and do much more of a flowing sequence in order to prevent us from all freezing to death, as there was no mention of “frostbite” in the release form they signed.

I started by having him keeping a sharp focus on his breath—where he felt it filling in his body, the quality, etc. I gave him very specific things on which to direct his focus, from precise placement of his physical body to the sensations he felt in particular areas of his body and then told him suddenly, “Close your eyes.” I followed by asking him, “How many people are around the area here?”

He answered, “I have no idea.”

I went on with the new lesson plan, telling him that when we are really focused on what we are doing in that very moment, all the stuff around us fades and only what we are focusing on seems to matter. I brought it back to the self-consciousness he exhibited before we even started class and then to a big worldview lesson how we are essentially responsible for all our own issues and that it is really the perspective we choose to take which adjusts our view the world and our surroundings.

I studied tai chi chuan for over seven years and sometimes was asked to teach the class. It was in this class where I met J.D. and who had often complimented me on what a good teacher I was. I used the example of the tai chi chuan slow form to illustrate how the same principle of control in transitioning from one position to another can be used in yoga. J.D. totally grooved on this and said, “I haven’t thought about tai chi in a long time and your example just made this lesson really click for me.”

Later I decided to work on an issue he had where he would usually fall out of balance getting into and coming out of “high flying lunge,” a position where you’re in a deep lunge with the arms raised above your head and the back leg is straight and balancing on the ball of its foot. I noticed that he would compensate for his difficulty finding balance by shifting the sole of his back foot flat on the ground. This not only avoided him falling on his ass but it also prevented him from exploring how to find balance in a position that was challenging for him. It soon became an unconscious pattern that his foot would flatten out and he would thereby ignore my guidance to place the back foot on the ball of the foot.

When I am teaching a group of students, I don’t always have the time to focus on a repeated problem of an individual student. I may tell them to be mindful of something but if they continue to be mindless about it, for the sake of the flow for the class, I usually have to just drop it. But because I had J.D. one-on-one, I could spend the time to really delve into this issue for him and be a tour guide and fellow journeyer in his adventure of awareness.

For me, the main focuses of yoga is consciousness and awareness—not “getting through it,” becoming a circus freak or even staying in balance. We did more work on getting into and out of “high flying lunge”—another unplanned activity—and soon he seemed to have become much more conscious about his positioning and this even reflected in his more steady balance.

At the end of the class I gave a dharma talk, which is where a yoga teacher pretends that they are “deep” and “spiritual” and actually knows something besides how to teach an exercise class. I usually talk about how to apply the lessons of yoga that we worked on in class that day to life and the real-world situations in which we find ourselves.

I took a yoga class at a gym once and after coming out of corpse pose and feeling very relaxed, the teacher started jarring us with some stupid lesson on, “I mean, like a girlfriend of mine was asked out on a date. She didn’t want to go. If someone asks you out and you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. I mean, maybe it wasn’t even that she didn’t like the guy, you know? Maybe she just wanted to do her hair that night.” It was so idiotic and irritating that it felt like being woken up by a toothy blowjob—no matter how valiant of an effort you make to relax into it, you find it so irritating that you just wish it would stop.

My dharma talk was, shall we say, much less “toothy” and J.D. told me how he always appreciated my classes and considered me an excellent teacher but how this class was especially great. He went on to give me advice about what “You need to do” which I will write about in another piece. As a teaser, I don’t “need” to do anything and when someone tells me as if they “know” what my soul needs to do I want to beat them with a baseball bat, not in order to knock any sense into them but to knock out the brain in their skull that has not been functioning as anything more than a paperweight for their neck.

I was so in flow during the class and was really excited about it! After class, I called Roach up to share with her in my excitement. Like a thrilled kid who had captured his first butterfly, I started to tell her about how no one showed and then I was meditating and then J.D. sat next to me and he wasn’t blaming me but he really was and how once we started I was so connected to flow and…

She didn’t respond with even a, “Mm-hmm” or anything and finally I asked if she was still there, as it has happened to me more than once where a call is dropped and I have gone on for 10-minutes babbling to only myself and the two FBI agents that monitor all my calls.

She told me she was still there, which was only half-true, as while she was on the other side of the phone, she had ceased being present with me soon after “Hello.” If we were starring in Jerry MaGuiere, Roach would have destroyed the last scene where I busted into her girls’ night gathering and told her that I loved her and wanted to make it work and what does she have to say about that with, “You lost me at ‘hello.’”

She informed me, in an annoyed tone in case her words weren’t clear enough for me, possibly mistaking me for the clueless Mr. MaGoo instead of the romantic Mr. Maguiere, how she didn’t have time to talk about this now. I said without another word, “Okay, call me when you have time,” and we hung up.

She informed me, in an annoyed tone in case her words weren’t clear enough for me, possibly mistaking me for the clueless Mr. MaGoo instead of the romantic Mr. Maguiere, how she didn’t have time to talk about this now. I said without another word, “Okay, call me when you have time,” and we hung up.

When we talked later she was quick to inform me how inconsiderate I had been, how she didn’t have time to talk before and I had essentially bombarded her with my excitement. Responding like someone who was pussywhipped—which is not a special way to prepare the whipped cream on top of an ice-cream sundae, (“Hi, I’ll have the Jim Dandy Sundae with two scoops of hazelnut fudge swirl and one scoop of vanilla pecan with hot fudge, colored sprinkles and if you could pussywhip the cream on top, you know—beat it with a whisk that you keep soaking in the juice from a tuna can—that would be great”—but is typical of a guy who will talk like a pussy to his woman because he doesn’t want to lose the fact that he’s getting some pussy and so he meow’s like a pussy to his girl and if he had scraped his knee the week before, it would be oozing a little pussy now.

It wasn’t that I needed pussy, although I was fairly amenable to getting it. It was that Roach and I had shared an incredible closeness in a very short amount of time and I was like a wife who started living in denial as she justifies her husband’s beating her to her best friend with, “I suppose I deserved it for leaving the top of the toothpaste tube uncapped.” I was denying that the most important thing to me is to be able to express myself freely and not be judged every time I open my mouth to talk about how I wouldn’t fuck a nun because it would probably require a whole bottle of Astroglide and a shoehorn to get my dick inside her tight, dry pussy and I wasn’t sure that this was worth burning in Hell for eternity and it would be an interesting Nun Study to see if their pussies are actually tighter than their assholes because at least their assholes have something passing through them, as opposed to their pussies which are as frequented as an ice-cream stand in the North Pole.

So instead of saying, “What the fu—? Do you have sand in your vagina or something?” I said, “I’m sorry. I suppose I could have started the conversation asking you if you had time to talk then. I was just so excited and wanted to share with you what I was feeling. In my defense, I did get off the phone right when you said you didn’t have time then to talk.”

But that’s just it, who the hell needs to be on the “defense” with someone who supposedly “loves” you (which seriously raises the question about their understanding of what exactly “love” entails)? I was overflowing with excitement and wanted to drench that special someone who I cared about and thought cared about me with my juices (An interesting reflection, I use the same line regarding facial cum shots as well, with equally poor results.)

If I were just going to be put on the “defense” I would at least want O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” with me. I mean, if they could get a murderer set free to play golf and write a “fiction” book entitled If I Had Killed My Ex-Wife And Her Friend While I Was High On Cocaine—This Is How I Would Do It, surely they could set me free of the oppression I was facing for just wanting to share my excitement with someone! Unfortunately, Johnny Cock-ring died of an overdose of ego and wasn’t available.

I’m going to give you a side story to illustrate my whole point, which is a lot more than just “Roach is a bitch,” although if that is all you get out of this piece then my life’s purpose will be complete and I will be ready to die and go on to Muslim Heaven, which is located in the same location of ImaginationLand as Mormon Heaven, only in Muslim Heaven only the ugly women are covered with burkas and the pretty ones are naked and whoring with all the losers who blew themselves up because they followed a leader who told them that this was the ultimate service to Allah while somehow mumbling through the explanation of why he wouldn’t blow his own ass up for Allah. Still, it’s much better than Mormon Heaven where there is an endless supply of soon-to-not-be “Mormon goy” who are approached by Mormons who are just as dead as they were on earth, the only difference being now they are without a body, holding The Book of Mormon in their hands and when they say, “Would you like to convert to our cult?” the response is always an enthusiastic, “Why, of course!” for a Mormon’s highest goal in life—and death—is not getting laid or getting wasted or enlightenment or meeting God but converting people. Roach would never be allowed into Mormon Heaven for she tends to frown upon this kind of enthusiasm.

I walked out of my apartment and this guy in my building was there who had been working for the past couple of months on his motor scooter outside our building. Every time I entered or left my building, I’d see him with his took kit and pieces of his bike splayed all over the sidewalk. This time he told me, “I just took her for a ride and it was a lot of fun! I finally fixed what was wrong with her.” I told him that I didn’t realize it was broken and thought he was just completely anal about his bike. He went on a bit and while I couldn’t give a shit about this guy with whom I never shared anything more than his girlfriend’s pussy, I stayed present with him because whenever you see someone in their excitement it is Cosmic Law #1 that you should seek to support that. Cosmic Law #2 has something to do with not farting in an elevator.

The founder of Non-Violent Communication, Norman Rosenberg, talks about “What is alive in you?” He says that beyond the technical word patterns that you can use to better help you communicate in a non-violent way with others, the most important thing to remember is that you want to support “what is alive” in another and “what is alive” in yourself. By this he means the things, actions, feelings or sex toys that make one feel exploding with life. [Editor’s note: Make sure to properly sterilize any sex toy you may borrow before shoving it inside of any of your orifices or sticking any of your appendages inside of one of its orifices.]

If your child comes up to you and says, “Daddy, I’m so excited! I drew a picture and it felt like God was drawing through me! I want to show you!” and you tell her, “You know better than to interrupt Daddy when he is looking at the Stock Market report” then you’re a prick and deserve to die a painful drawn-out cancer death that if Obama’s Socialist healthcare plan passes, all the taxpayers will be paying for.

I am a big supporter of the idea that as long as you’re not hurting someone else, do whatever the fuck you want. Shoot heroine into your vein in the privacy of your own home as long as you don’t then go out and drop a case of the heroine runs on the sidewalk. Watch a gay show like “Sex in the City” just as long as your shades are down and no passerby will have to inadvertently see it through your window. Go to a hotel and hang yourself from the closet rod so you can enhance your jerking-off just as long as you don’t screw it up and traumatize the cleaning lady when she finds you hanging there with your face blue and pants and undies around your ankles.

In addition to the personal freedom to do whatever the fuck we want to do— hopefully what our souls “came here” to do and not just to enjoy hedonism because us infidels won’t be able to enjoy the kind of debauchery that is reserved for good terrorists in Muslim Heaven—the other blessing we can share with the world is to support “what is alive” in others. It is not some “Save the Whales” or “Peace on Earth” bullshit mission to change the world into some pussy Kumbaya-singing gathering of pantywaists but to support “what is alive” in others and “what is alive” in ourselves.

Of course we’ll all make tons of bullshit excuses such as “I don’t have time, what with all my ‘Save the Whales’ campaigning” or “I’m too angry about some stupid shit that came from his mouth to extend myself to his heart,” and instead of actually changing the world starting today, we’ll be on an eternal mission to change the world sometime tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes. These are the same morons goose-stepping with a copy of Eckart Tolle’s The Power of NOW raised in their “HEIL!” hand while all they focus on is the BEFORE and AFTER, and I’m not talking about those Photoshopped photos in the latest “miracle” diet ads.

Someone comes to you and says, “I’m so excited about this!” and you tell him how you’re mad that he left the dishes in the sink. Your son comes up to you and says, “Mom, I really did my best in baseball today and even though my team lost, I feel good about it!” and the first thing you say back to him is, “Did you break that lamp?” How sad that we often let our anger and frustration suck the very life force out of “what is alive” in someone until they are left standing with an empty vacuum inside of them where only moments before there was utter excitement.

People ridicule Voodoo curses and witchcraft spells, and not just the ones that Michelle Obama’s mother casts in the White House, and yet what is a clearer curse than throwing cold water on the fiery passion inside of someone? What is a clearer love charm than sharing and supporting the excitement of another?

Magic is real and doesn’t need any “evil eye” or black candle to cast. Why not make life for yourself and others not a curse…but a blessing?

[10 times. That is how many times the word “pussy,” or some derivation thereof, appeared in this piece.]

REFLECTION:

“What is alive” in you? And by this I don’t mean something like that scene in the first Alien movie where the baby alien breaks out of that dude’s stomach and runs away on the ship. (Man, that was an awesome scene!) What gets you totally excited? And by this I don’t mean something like the scene from Fast Times At Ridgemont High where Phoebe Cates comes out of the pool during Brad’s fantasy wack-off scene and takes her top off? (Man, that was hot!) What makes you feel totally pumped? And by this I am not talking about something like the Johnny “Wad” Holmes Penis Enlarger you bought last year and have been using daily and still show no signs of growth on your tiny pecker (Man, that porn star has a huge wang!) What makes you so excited that you feel you will explode unless you share it with someone else? And by this I don’t mean one of those suicide bomb vests that are all the fashion in the Islamic world (Man, that’s just stupid!)

When was the last time that you either asked or supported “what is alive” in someone else?

MEDITATION:

Focus on “what is alive” in you and see yourself going through your day always feeling connected to this excitement. Imagine sharing “what is alive” in you with someone else and he or she is very excited by you feeling that way and supports you by adding his or her own fuel to your inner fire. How does that make you feel?

Imagine you support “what is alive” in those you love and they leave you feeling even more excited about life than when they came to you. Imagine if you supported “what is alive” in everyone with whom you interacted. What would your world look like if that were the case? Wouldn’t you want everyone—even your enemies—to feel completely excited about life? I doubt your enemies would remain enemies if they stayed in their excitement. Wouldn’t that be worth exploring? Or do you think marching with a “No Nukes!” sign is the way to change an enemy to a friend?