I haven’t been blogging much lately, at all. Well, I just haven’t had much to say. Last night, I watched Contagion in which Lawrence Fishburne’s character spews, “Blogging is not writing. Blogging is graffiti with punctuation.” Also, one of my heroes, the great writer Jon Franzen, advises his aspiring and wishfully like-minded audience of “writers” to unplug our computers when writing — to disconnect ourselves from the auspices of Google Chrome and Firefox. He even goes so far as to declare a piece of literature aided by Internet research as useless. Seeing how this is (a) a blog and (b) already aided and abetted by the Interwebz in at attempt to correctly spell Lawrence Fishburne’s last name…I am already screwed.
And I vow, to those of you who’ve so graciously messaged me here, on Facebook, and through my very own graffiti site’s email address, to not leave you hanging any longer. I solemnly swear that even if I am authoring glittery words of narcissistic self-importance of such irrelevance as What I Think About Board Games, I will not neglect this mural of my life and rants and woes and whatever any longer.
Onward.
Yoga. I’ve been doing it for years. I first began yoga practice in my living room, in front of my TV, with Rodney Yee. At the time, I was one of those boxed-in hard core Catholics whose close friend informed her that yogic meditation was evil. Being the sheepish creature that I was, I decided that yoga postures in secret were the way to go.
Once I was out of that God-forsaken box, (please, bear in mind, any organized religion that leaves you awake at wee morning hours with a figurative hooded figure sitting on your chest with his ghost hands snaked around your throat is, regardless of how often it is practiced, a Godless religion) I decided to meditate more often.
So what happened, then? Nothing. Nothing happened. I did not feel a divine sense of purpose. In fact, once solidified in my yogic ways, I fucked up my personal life a lot. I continued to meditate and position myself in pretzel-like fashion regularly, and last year I decided to get certified and teach the practice that I still did not understand.
I watched a yoga documentary sometime in Spring of last year and wrote in review. Basically, this chick takes on the yogic journey of Some Random Guy and documents the entire journey. She takes him to India, she forces him into inversions and yoga classes varying in both style, practice, and spirituality. Nothing much happens, except that she becomes increasingly disgruntled that he doesn’t “get it”. That he doesn’t find himself a sudden epiphanous creature of higher intellect and deeper thought process in the midst of a prolonged Down Dog. He, on the other hand, remains true to his apathetic nature regarding The Yoga; he is neither enlightened nor enshrined nor indoctrinated into the ways of the yogi. At the end of the documentary, he goes back to rock climbing and she goes back to head stands and pondering the failures of the universe and of her mission.
Anyway. I’ve been pretty down about yoga lately, because I have a lot of very enlightened yogi friends. Their peace runs deep, their ohms run guttural, their souls — at least outwardly — appear cleansed of All Things Faltering. Their mantras annoy me, too. As does their constant. fucking. ohm’ing.
This has caused me pause. I have begun to feel as if I’m missing out on some fundamentally important attribute of yoga that my congested chakras and reinforced outwardly-ways have disallowed me from grasping. I am still impatient; I still get really distracted by cleaning, or my own failures, or the past, or the future, or my relationships, or my undending need to descend from all that is conformity. What. The. Fuck. Taryn?
And then today, I was sitting here just wheezing and cursing asthma and cursing Advair for making addicted to my twice-daily 500/50 dose, and cursing bad health and cursing anti-biotics and cursing this weather and cursing treadmill running for making me soft and cursing cold Alaskan winter weather for making me too afraid of fucking weather-induced asthma attack to go outside and run in this stupid weather…
When it hit me.
Whoever came up with that Nike slogan was a genius. Who cares what yoga is and is not doing for me? Who cares if I am coming off as The Proper Yogi? Who cares if my aura is black as death or bright as the motherfucking sun? Who cares if I swear too much, for a yoga instructor?
Just as with running, what matters is that I do it. That I practice, that I teach, that I learn. It doesn’t matter if I eat organic fruit or adopt the outward lifestyle of a yogi, how many damn bangles I wear on my arms to class, how often I say “Namaste” or what kind of music I play in class.
There should never be anything pretentious about yoga.
And that, friends, is exactly as divine a lesson as yoga has taught me thus far: That what I do should never, ever define me, because the second that it does, my identity is lost in that one purpose. Just as Catholicism became the hooded figure on my chest, so yoga shall not. Because why? Because even though I have a yoga mat inscribed, “Namaste, bitches”, yoga is actually teaching me a thing or two about myself.
So I guess all that meditation wasn’t all in vain, after all.
PS I have decided that once I’m finished with this certification, my biz name will be The Angry Yogi. Stick that in your hookah pipe and smoke on it.
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