I went to a Meet-Up group event that involved doing yoga for an hour followed by a raw food potluck, where all the hippies smoke pot and strip down in the raw. Unfortunately, I was the only hippie and when I raised the ganja and dropped the drawers, let us just say that after this point no one touched the sprouted mung bean hotdogs.
The yoga class was a very good class—if you were an absolute beginner who never took a yoga class in your life. The instructor broke down positions, paying attention to specific details that I generally don’t give a shit about but I suppose someone else might. For those who do yoga, the class amounted to about an hour of Cat/Cow and one Sun Salutation. But despite being taught out of a textbook entitled “Yoga For Retards,” I got one of the best learning’s in yoga that I have had in awhile.
Now think of this, if you went to a checkers workshop hoping to stretch your checkers muscles and the instructor was like, “You see, these are the RED pieces. RED is a color. It is lighter than the other pieces, which are the BLACK pieces. BLACK is also a color—well, some would say not a color, but a shade. BLACK is darker than RED,” you would probably upturn the checkers sets, flipping all the pieces—both the lighter RED and darker BLACK—on the floor in frustration, the same way you did when you lost to your mother for the first time and shouted, “YOU SUCK!” and ran out of the room crying. In my defense, it was ping-pong and not checkers and she did suck.
Anytime a thought came up in my head like, “Is ten minutes discussing how to stand up with our feet together really necessary??” I would simply let it go and keep my attention on my breathing and imagine an image of my beloved guru. “Standing has been used throughout the ages as a variation to sitting.” Deep breath in…my beloved…”When one stands he is taller in stature, unless the chair he happens to be on is really, really high…” Deep breath out…my beloved…
And while my physical body wasn’t pushed much beyond what it gets from an hour of sitting on my couch and reading conspiracy theories, my being was beaming, for it was given the leading role for a change while my body was relegated to one of the chorus girls. And this is a huge lesson: It is not what you DO that matters, it is WHO YOU ARE which is of importance. This tends to be forgotten when the focus of yoga has tended to be on performance instead of self-awareness.
Whenever I ask a first-time Swami X-er about her experience with yoga, she inevitably seems to apologize and beg my forgiveness for not being a better yogi, as if it is a sin not to be able to touch your toes or hold your balance. Instead of exploring and experiencing yoga, they look at me like one of their fake saviors who can remove all their non-existent sins without any work on their part. Maybe I’ll hire some perverted “assistants” to whom they can confess and have their little boys molested. At least at my church I won’t pretend that it is a “spiritual” act designed to save his cherry ass from Satan; I will call it what it is: rape, technically sodomy, as statistics have shown that only one in five little boys have a vagina.
“You should know a tree by its fruits,” said Jesus. He was wrong. We don’t have the eyes to see beyond the fruit, so we judge the tree by its fruit alone, with the understanding that a fruitless tree is worth less than a tree that bears fruit. And it’s not. Whether you’re comparing your fruit to the rest of the yoga community, to your co-workers or to society as a whole, your “tree” is unique and incomparable, regardless of whether you can quote something to the contrary in a “holy” book or not.
An apple tree doesn’t compare itself with a fig tree. “You call those fruits? Ha! They’re so small!” A fig tree doesn’t compare itself with an oak tree. “What the fuck can you do with an acorn anyway? Oh, you’re right, you can feed them to squirrels. Wow, you’re really going to win a Nobel Prize for that.”
The trees all know that as long as you are in touch with your Authentic Self it is impossible to compare one unique snowflake with another besides in the grossest form: both are made of snow and are created when God scratches his balls. When you are in touch with your Authentic Self, it doesn’t matter whether you are doing a headstand or standing on a street corner, whether you are a raw food vegan or a cow-slaughtering carnivore, whether you sit on a meditation cushion or sit on the lap of a rapist priest.
This is why our world is having such trouble finding peace as a unified forest. They see union as “uniform,” where every tree is an exact clone of its neighbor and, needless to say, the only way for that kind of union is through domination, suppression, oppression—and genetic engineering. Union doesn’t mean you dissolve your unique Self into another, it means you both are at peace with each the other being different and actually encourage the other to be her own unique expression; sounds like the exact opposite of corporate religion.
They say Islam translates as “peace” and Christianity is about “love.” The way these corporations are “practiced” is that unless you believe exactly what they believe, they’ll put a Jihad on your ass or you’ll burn forever in fake Hell. If I were Muhammad or Jesus, I would come back and say, “I love you in spite of the fact that you are all morons and misinterpreting my words.”
I stayed in touch with my Authentic Self in “Yoga For Retards.” And with a little self-study and appreciation even a brassiere can become, in the words of the record-holder for shortest stint as a bra salesman, George Costanza, “Two loops in the back…two cups in the front. Wow!”
“so we judge the tree by its fruit alone, with the understanding that a fruitless tree is worth less than a tree that bears fruit. And it’s not.”
Fully true. It takes so much more courage and strength!..
A “yoga poser” will not explore that courage and strength but instead spend her days sitting under the fruit tree and reciting to all passersby that “Life is bliss.” A “yogi” will sit under the most gnarled up tree imaginable and will also tell all passersby that “Life is bliss.” The only difference being, the yogi KNOWS and the yoga poser pretends.
You’re writing ability fucking kills me….I’m your new biggest fan!! XOXO
I generally don’t encourage a “fan” to use foul language, especially when she’s a pussy like you. So watch your mouth, bitch!