This blog consists mainly of personal journals about my practices. These are astanga vinyasa yoga, 5Rhythms dance and the ngondro of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. It also includes articles about the experiential aspects of the practice of astanga yoga – not how to do postures, but what it's like to be on the mat, why we go there, why we sometimes don't, and what we may encounter on the yoga journey.

Namaste!

Too much need for ‘perfection’, when the real perfection is underlying it all – all that I consider not up to scratch. Or not even that ... it’s more that it’s meshed within it – within the blowsy roses and the half-wild garden and the green plastic chairs with the scratches and the dull-grey summer day. It’s pressing through to the surface of everything that doesn’t try and doesn’t care a bit. It has nothing to do with my ‘standards’. It has nothing to do with what I think I have to do to prove that I am who I think I want to impersonate. None of that really has anything to do with perfection. Yes, I put a lot of energy into impersonating a yoga teacher, and then everyone adds their projections and the illusion is complete, but it’s only ever that: an illusion. And none of it has anything to do with perfection – nothing at all.

As soon as I made the link with Samye Dzong – offered the lunchtime meditation sessions and they accepted – I realised how much I want not to be a part of the one institution – any one institution – or even to be a student of the one teacher. What I want is to be the yogi up in the mountains, growing my dreadlocks and living in a cave. Actually, ‘want’ doesn’t come into it; it’s just a predisposition. I can try to counter it, but I’m going against my own grain. I seek practices that cut me loose and expose me to my own wildness, that lead me up the creek without a paddle and abandon me there. Of course, ultimately, all practices lead you up that creek, even when it looks as if there’s a big institutional safety net or a teacher holding your hand. And, yes, at the same time there’s a need for surrender of the will, and on a dualistic level that appears to be at odds with self-determination and the mandate – the absolute mandate – to follow your own path, your own, but only on a dualistic level.

I’m into my summer teaching schedule, which means that tomorrow I have all day to roll around in – aside from getting Rowan to school and home again.

The desire to eliminate extrinsics from my life – things, stimulation ... all the unnecessary distractions. But this isn’t it really. All those external things are just a cypher for the real necessity, which is to simplify myself – to empty myself – because the real nature of myself is emptiness. So I suppose the desire is actually just to become consonant with the reality of what I am. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Thomas Merton. This sounds like something he might have written.

Too much ‘me’. I’m so centred around what I want and what I feel, and (whether I get what I want or not) it’s oppressive. This has nothing to do with a kind of nursery virtuousness, like ‘share your toys’, or the quid pro quo ‘do unto others ...’, which are just other attitudes of the ego. This is a more radical internal shift. In this culture, me-ness is so normative that my own has been almost transparent, but it’s starting to thicken and darken and become visible to me: the ego curdling. There’s a kind of pursuit that appears ‘spiritual’, and maybe it’s appropriate when you’re young, but if it doesn’t exhaust itself, you never wind down into stillness, equanimity. Everything is contained in the grain of this moment. More and more, I experience this directly.

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s journals. He gets good as he reaches middle years. Before that, he’s a bit histrionic and florid – which is really only what I would expect. I expect it because it’s just what I see in myself. To find it in someone else’s journey, at a point where I’m starting to let go of some of the internal melodrama, is clarifying. His struggle around the desire (is it?) or vocation (is it?) for hermitage resonates with me. I understand the need to whittle everything down to the absolute minimum, and then also the doubt whether this isn’t just a new form of self-indulgence – literally, the indulging of the self rather than its whittling down, which is what I really ought to be about.

Actually, this clarified something else for me. There’s talk around me at the moment about ways of living in community, and I’ve wondered why I don’t feel the attraction. Now I see that it’s because I’m moving in the opposite direction. People come into community usually in order to simplify, but what generally happens is that a new layer of complication gets added. And then I can’t help experiencing community as institution, which always turns my blood cold. I began adulthood in a kind of aloneness that was actually alienation. It was a product of fear and incapacity. I was so lonely I didn’t even know to call it that. The intervening years have been like living in a bag of pebbles. All kinds of sharp edges got knocked off and rough surfaces were rubbed smooth. I learnt to relate to people in deeper and deeper ways. Now, if I think of solitude, it feels like a place not just of peace and silence but also of deep connection. Hermitage? I don’t know. But definitely as I move out of the child-rearing phase I’m looking to make more space for practising, contemplating, being. Already I’m eliminating as much activity and stimulation as I can bear to be without. Sometimes I feel like that artist who stitched his eyelids together, because he said that by the age of 30 he’d already seen more than he could process in the entire rest of his life.

Because I didn’t have Rowan until I was 36, I feel, in a way, a bit out of synch with myself. I’m of an age where I might otherwise be moving into the third asrama, whereas actually Rowan is only nine, and it will be a while before I can head for the forest. Really, though, it’s impossible to be out of synch with yourself. Everything is unfolding in the only possible way. To say it’s the ‘best’ way or the ‘perfect’ way would be to miss the point. It’s just the way it’s unfolding.

Found myself on the Circle Line today. Suddenly, just an undertone, the old smell of the Underground, jolting me back 20 years, to the city I lived in then, which is a completely different city from the one I live in now. That one was ... How to nail it? It was so urban, and I was so out on all my surfaces, without a centre. Now there’s a lot more grass, and so much that seemed to matter then – because it was holding me together like a battery of steel pins – really doesn’t matter at all.

There’s a lot of doingness in the ngondro. I have to do 100,000 prostrations and 100,000 mantras and etc, etc ... a lot of things. In a way, it’s a young person’s practice, and I wish I’d got myself enough together to do it a long time ago. In mid-life, the desire for doing is falling away and I’m increasingly subsiding into being, so I feel a bit out of kilter with all these accumulations of actions. I certainly don’t need to prove to myself that I have the self-discipline to accumulate them. Yes, I’m squeezing the last little blob of toothpaste out of the tube with the ngondro. Which is to say, there won’t be any more big heroic practices for me.

Getting on the mat
Another fuck-up. But there are no fuck-ups really, only the cat purring, stretched out on my belly, and a child breathing the breath of sleep at my side. There could even be something of grace in this, if I could let go and accept it. Self-discipline can be neurotic, as anyone who has been anorexic knows. Perhaps that’s what’s crumbling in me. The thing is, I know now that practices are just a way of passing the time. They have only a tangential relationship to awakening. But in the world of action, we want to do something, and practices give us the illusion that doing can be somehow harnessed to awakening.

According to the Yoga Alliance, ‘a dedicated, committed teacher practises regularly – at least four times a week.’ I also used to believe that to teach with integrity a teacher must practise regularly, but now I would rather choose a teacher who doesn’t practise at all. Because practising is an intermediate stage. You don’t practise if you have arrived at the end of the journey ... or abandoned all hope of arrival, because abandoning everything is really it. I mean, Ramana Maharshi didn’t practise. He didn’t need to. He worked in the kitchen.

I’m reading Paradise, by A.L. Kennedy, which is written in the voice of an alcoholic. At first I hated that voice, with its mealy-mouthed dishonesty and its wriggling out. Then I saw that I hated it because it’s mine. Because although I don’t black out and wake up two days later in an unfamiliar room, my life is full of little escapes, moments when I absent myself, in chocolate, caffeine, novels, sleep ... I would like to be able not to do this, but constant presence is enlightenment, so perhaps that would be a stretch.

‘How are you?’ I suppose this blog is in part a public statement in response to that question, which always stymies me, having so many potential answers, most of them socially unacceptable.

I’m reading a book by Patrick Gale – Notes from an Exhibition – in which the central character is a bipolar artist. I came across this idea again ... Where did I encounter it so clearly stated first? Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi says: ‘Manna was one of those people who would experience ecstasy but not happiness.’ I remember being stunned by recognition then. I know all about ecstasy and also about the mist that falls like a pall so you touch things but cannot feel them, as if you are experiencing the world – even your own internal world – through a scrim. But happiness? Not a clue. I can’t find a place for that in the geography of my body.

‘[The darkness] had no real cause and it came upon her with devastating speed, like a storm across bright water.' More Patrick Gale. A nice snippet of prose. He makes me want again to live in Cornwall – the natural place for an extremist, I suppose: the very toe of the country, the furthest edge, facing out into the sea. Where on earth else would I want to be?

My Little Book of Self-sabotage: that’s the other way I’ve been getting myself onto the mat ... my book of refuse, where every night I deposit the psychic junk that embarrasses me too much to make it onto these pages. My Pillow Book of Intention: it’s that too: a place for writing a clear pathway.

Tomorrow is June. My favourite time of the year, when everything is rising to a crescendo. My body feels good in summer ... I feel good in summer. I crave heat, sun.

I read some other people’s practice blogs. Either I am self-dramatising or extremely intense – or both. I feel a bit embarrassed really. As a result, I scratched what was going to be my previous entry, and which felt rawer and more self-exposing than what went before. I write first of all for myself, not for anyone else who might possibly be listening, and yet, clearly, I am editing just in case.

If I am self-dramatising, it isn’t that I don’t realise the ultimate emptiness of all my stories. It isn’t that I don’t see how they go round and round like a ball of string. It’s just that somehow they can’t be let go of until they have been hauled up from the bottom of the sea and rinsed in clean water. Maybe this is the meaningful function of art.

I am getting out of bed and onto my mat every morning, and it has been delightful. I stopped trying to dismantle the old patterns, and turned my energy to creating new ones. It’s tremendously powerful when the practice becomes the basis for each day: the round-bottomed bowl on which the day rocks and rolls but never quite slops its liquid. I see it like this anyway.

Why am I finding it so difficult to get on my mat these days?

Because in order to find my way onto the mat, I have to get out of bed, and in order to get out of bed I have to grope my way through a cloud of free-floating anxiety, and I would rather stay in bed and kid myself for a couple more hours that I don’t have to face the day.

When the alarm clock goes off, there’s a critical mass that has to be reached if I’m actually going to get up. On the one side of the balance is the said desire to hide under the duvet and hope that the day doesn’t find me. Then there’s the need (genuine) to get enough sleep, which I rarely do when I’m on the mat regularly at 5am. On the other side is the knowledge that practising forms the foundation for my day, that if I don’t do it, the whole structure will be rickety and in constant danger of collapse. Which begs the question, I suppose, how much I create the day and how much it’s already out there pre-formed and waiting for me.


In the garden suntrap. Carol Shields describes driving to Toronto in the snow: everything ‘the colour of cement’. Massachussetts was like that, when I was there that winter. The monotony of it. So un-nutritious when colour feeds you. Down by the Thames, with the tide swirling in: a bollard kind of thing, bright-blue paint eaten away, and lichen growing over. Salt water does this, brings up the intensity of colours, and the texture – even of ordinary synthetic things: bottle tops, old bits of plastic.

Here’s a resolution. I’ve made it before, but as of now it sticks. Promise. Tomorrow is the day I get back on my mat, first thing in the morning, and from then on every day (except Wednesdays: day off). Without any agenda except to be with my body for two hours in whatever way feels appropriate. I will muster the courage to get up and embrace the day, because, let’s face it, if I don’t it will break the door down. I will acknowledge the the fear and the resistance and I will get on the damn mat anyway, knowing that, from the larger perspective, it’s the sanest way.

And that too passed ... By which I mean that on some level all of it continues to be so, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter too much any more.

The right side of my body is in serial collapse: joints going down like dominoes. As much as I can, I avoid asking myself what this means. I have a certain internal cartography. I know – or think I do – where certain experiences, certain traits of personality, certain clusters of emotion are located in my body, and this is valid on a certain level. But knowing it all too surely blocks out space for the unknown. And then there’s the awareness that all of this geography exists only on the relative plane. In moments of intense presence, in movement, it’s all dissolved. It just doesn’t exist. So it seems better not to feed it too much energy.

I feel dark inside. Through the dance, a certain process is unwinding itself in me. It is plotless and unmapped, and it isn’t finished. In the meantime this is where it leaves me, in this place – this dark place. It’s not so much that it’s hard to put this into words (although it is), but more that it’s hard to know whether putting it into words is any use – or whether words just fossilise it into some sort of spurious permanence with all the meaning leached out. When I was a child, one of my aunts had a place-mat made out of dead butterflies. They were laminated into a gruesome kind of sandwich, their fat furry bodies bulging the transparent plastic. Even at the age of eight, maybe, I saw how the essential point had been missed. I saw how when you take something bright and vibrant and on the wing and seal it into plastic limbo, you are not understanding that the wonder and beauty of life is in its evanescence, that you have destroyed whatever there was of vitality there and left yourself with some sort of grim sarcophagus.

Sometimes when I write I feel that I am committing the evanescent into the limbo of ink. When I was a child, a process occurred by which I was dislocated from my body into words. My instinctive impulse to move was displaced into the acquired discipline of writing. I was like a gypsy baby switched at birth, and once I had grown up and found my way back, I couldn’t quite trust the gadjes any more. So when I engage in the process of writing, my heart and my throat constrict a bit; my stomach speeds up. I want to struggle. I want to batter my wings against the camphor jar. That’s what it did to me in the end, dislocating myself into writing: it suffocated me and sealed me in plastic: silent, immobile. Yes, I had words – I published them – but they were half-dead: zombie words. Their lifeforce had flown away.

If I’m writing this now, it’s because occasionally, if I can keep shedding garments and digging down deeper, the passage of words across paper ceases to be the record of something experienced in some other time, on some other occasion, and the words become the unique moment of themselves. They take wing. And even thinking this makes me smell camphor, and I want to select all and press the delete key.

I’ve never been closer to giving up not just the ngondro but the whole Buddhist project.

First there’s my experience of sitting, which is one of compression, claustrophobia – not 100 per cent of the time, but quite a bit of it. My impression of my childhood is of too much sitting still and being quiet: I suppressed a large part of what was most real and most valuable in myself. I supressed my passion and my responsivity. I suppressed my life and my warmth and my humanity. I often experience sitting meditation as a recapitulation of that suppression, and I want to explode, I want to howl, I want to weep, I want to laugh, I want to dance. I want to protest to the world that movement, not stillness, is my natural expression. Movement is where I find delight and fullness, is where I find pathways to something that is already here and at the same time beyond what is here – or through and between what is here, like the picture you can only see if you slide the black paper slots over the image in the right way.

And that leads me on to the cultural thing: the emotional ‘flatness’ that appears to my, Western, sensibility to characterise Buddhist cultures. I cannot make myself this way – and I sometimes feel that I’m being tacitly asked to – when my gateway is bliss, and the road to this gateway is all the emotions: sorrow, rage, grief, abundant joy ... It seems to me that there is room for these on the Hindu path and the Sufi path – more than room: they are themselves an aspect of the path – in a way that I feel they aren’t quite in Buddhism.

Sitting under the walkway on the banks of the Thames the other week, I received something like a personal mantra: ‘The world doesn’t need you to be a hero; it just needs you to dance’. I think that finishing the ngondro and making myself sit still are heroic. And it’s paradox, yes, because when I received the mantra I was sitting. And here’s where sitting works for me: when it happens in nature, when it’s spontaneous, when it’s the pause in the rhythm of the dance, the halt in the beat. When there’s no compulsion. Then it feels organic.

As I read this a few days later, I can see how I am at war with myself, how there’s no compulsion to do anything or be any particular way except the compulsion that I'm imposing upon myself. This changes the perspective but it doesn’t make me feel the conflict any the less. And maybe this is just my own particular way of creating an explosion.

Why do I find it so hard to get on my mat these days?

Partly because I feel that in some ways I use the discipline of the astanga practice to contain myself when I need to explode, to hold on when I need to let go and leap from the scaffolding. Because whereas the intention of the practice is to dismantle the structure of the ego, in some ways I use it to maintain my ego structure: I use my natural inclination towards self-discipline in the way I’ve most often used it – like anorexia – to hold myself together. And while this was necessary when I had no inherent sense of self, now it feels past its sell-by date. I don’t just have a sense of self now, but I’m cracking out of it. I need to explode.

And this is complex, because a spiritual practice isn’t anorexia, and I don’t practise in exactly the way that I was anorexic. So it’s not clear-cut. Still, it’s obvious to me that enlightenment has nothing to do with self-discipline. It’s the ego that gives points for 100,000 mantras and two hours on the mat. In this moment enlightenment would be for me the ultimate nuclear explosion: the big bang: the dance to end all dances, the howl that finally expends itself ... and then just floating, floating ... floating empty. But, of course, the big bang is also an image of creation, of new universes, not just destruction or ending.

In this moment, I like the image of the demolition squad better than the one of slow dismantling. I like the bulldozer better than the hammer and chisel. I like the bang and collapse better than the slow meticulous excavation. Dancing feels like the demolition squad. But, really, that isn’t so clear-cut either.

I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know whether I feel angry or anxious or lonely or sad. Really what I mean is I don't know which feeling is at the root of all the other feelings. They’re like the little coloured pieces in the kaleidoscope, tumbling and tumbling over one another, making new configurations always out of the same thing. But I do know that I need to be inside that beginningless, endless howl. The one that unloops from the darkest and most loveless recesses of my body. The one that lives in places beyond places and encompasses the universe.

It feels bottomless, that howl. And maybe it is: the universal howl that keeps regenerating itself out of the universal pain. And at the same time it isn’t bottomless or universal, but personal and just very deep, so that dipping into it is like taking a thimble to the ocean. I imagine that if I keep dancing, keep howling ... if, finally, I drain the ocean ... if I drain the wound ... I will arrive at the bedrock ... arrive at the original injury that I suppose to be underneath all the pus and the festering and the roiling weight of water. But that’s a story. And probably it’s a little bit trite. The main thing is just the howl.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

Because I don’t really want to. Because when I achieve a certain degree of orderliness in my life, I just have to kick over the wastepaper basket. The same goes for eating properly. It’s OK for a bit, but then I start to feel trapped. The situation is too claustrophobic. I have to erupt out of the structure, sending busted plywood and fat splinters flying. I have to let chaos in. There’s something so fundamental for me in this dynamic. It’s like a creative spring, an engine. But at the same time it’s also a stalemate. I’m a hung parliament, 50 per cent of the electorate gunning for consistent self-discipline, 50 per cent seeding anarchy. The result is that I'm like a two-year-old who keeps building the tower and then knocking it down again.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It seems that ngondro first thing in the morning is one straw too many for this poor old camel. So I’ve dropped it from my early-morning practice. It’s now relegated it to the cracks between the paving stones – the interstices in my day – where actually it’s flourishing pretty well, because its new situation better reflects my real priorities: moving practices first. It also does away with that little lurch that I experience in the instant transition from a Tibetan Buddhist practice to an Indian yogic one, though I suppose the lurch is still there implicitly. The fundamental disjunction, if it is a disjunction – Buddhism / vedanta – still exists. But that’s another trajectory and I won’t take off on it now.

Pat, just like that: a solution. Not really. Human nature is more complex. I don’t for one moment think I’ve cracked it, that next week – tomorrow even – the bucket will still hold water. Nevertheless, it has some value in its moment.

When I teach astanga vinyasa, I spend a lot of time talking about form and technique – about about the ‘how to’ aspects of the practice. How to align the body correctly and safely, how to move it more deeply into this or that posture, how to modify this or that posture to make it more accessible or comfortable ... This might give the impression that form and technique are the astanga practice, but, for me, this is not the case. The truth is that what we usually refer to as ‘yoga’ – getting into and out of asanas – is just the scaffolding. The actual yoga exists somewhere through and beyond this superficial stucture and is far less easy to encapsulate or define.

Another way to see ‘yoga’ – the practice of asanas – is as a husk. The husk is important, because without it the seed inside is unable to ripen, yet at the same time the husk is just a container. There comes a point where we as practitioners start to push our roots down through the husk and into the fertile soil of ourselves. This is where we begin to encounter yoga – the real thing.

For me, one of the beauties of practices that consist of set forms, as astanga vinyasa does, is that once the form is bedded into my body’s memory, I can let go of thinking about it and drop down onto a deeper level of awareness, simply riding on the wave of the movement while I notice what’s happening – in my mind, in my emotions, in my body and in the subtle energy channels that criss-cross it. I can notice my stories, my rationales, my critiques, my projections, and – sometimes – drop a few of them, so that increasingly I enter into the stillness that persists underneath the chatter of all my small-mind neuroses.

There’s a lot to be said, too, for a practice in which we simply follow our body, allowing it to find its own routes, without any fixed destination. However, astanga vinyasa isn’t that. In astanga we are following a road map. The pattern of the practice is externally imposed. There’s value in this. The way I see it is that the astanga series (whichever it may be) is a kind of practice-ground for life. In life, as in astanga vinyasa, I have no choice about many of the crucial events that I meet: love, loss, supta kurmasana ... But I do have some choice about how I respond to what I encounter. Just as I cannot refuse loss when it crosses my path – be it the loss of a job, the loss of possessions, the loss of status, the loss of a loved person – in the astanga practice I cannot refuse supta kurmasana ... or kapotasana or mayurasana or any of the other challenging events presented to me. But I can endeavour to respond sensitively and creatively, in such a way as to erode my ignorance and unconsciousness. I can opt to invite whatever crosses my path to expand me, to become a means of increasing my understanding so that as I continue on the road, I see with increasing clarity.

Astanga doesn’t allow us to bypass anything. Whatever we find tricky or intractable it presents to us again and again. In other forms of yoga, I was always able to avoid my nemeses, but astanga vinyasa just keeps confronting me with them until, gradually – perhaps – I transform them into something workable. Being a practice of the body, astanga reveals our current limitations to us on a physical plane, but, of course, that doesn’t mean that the body is the only – or even the main – place where these limitations operate. In my experience what is revealed in the body always has a psychological / emotional corollory. I can work with this material from just a physical or just a psychological / emotional point of view, but the process is much richer and more rewarding if I make it multi-faceted, open and encompassing of the totality of who I am and how I manifest in this body now.

As I get older I find that the structure of my yoga practice is slowly disintegrating. I could put anything on my mat and it would become yoga. Similarly, yoga does not happen only, or even mainly, in asanas. In a sense this isn’t a new departure. The boundary between my practice and my life has always been permeable – this is just the nature of yoga – but the lack of distinction now feels more radical. It’s as if the bones are being stripped out of my practice, collapsing it into my life. This doesn’t mean I no longer practise asanas or that I have literally abandoned the structure of the astanga series (although I do play with these structures more, I do feel into their plasticity, and I do allow for more reciprocity between them and my body). What it does mean, I feel, is that my sense of the interconnectedness of everything has become more experiential and less conceptual. I am less attached rigid forms and more ready to embrace the totality, the indivisibility of all that exists. My world is dissolving and my sense of self with it, so that I experience myself less as a discrete entity defined by thick black edges like a paper cut-out doll and more as a momentary whorl of atoms in a big atomic dance.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It isn’t just inertia. It isn’t just the season and the urge to hibernate. It’s something deeper and less graspable in my consciousness. It’s something about where my practice came from, way back, long before it was a practice ... about the need to flee my mother’s house and how I have been running, running all these years, and how lately I have gradually slowed down and risked looking over my shoulder. But my practice grows out of many roots. Only some of them are fed by fear and flight.

I thought I would burn our old love letters. Not in a grand funereal pyre, or each individually with its own match. This isn’t grief or the dramatic gesture. I was thinking more pragmatically, of kindling for the fire. Liberated ... all those nails we drove into the floor, all those words, all those little black platoons marching purposefully across the page like ants. Of course, we couldn’t nail down anything. You never can. Or maybe I’ll use our letters to line the compost bin. It pleases me to think of all those big emotions mulching down, re-arranging themselves into the anatomy of worms.

For me, there’s nothing personal about the dance. It isn’t emotion put into movement; that’s back-to-front. The dance looks like me when it comes through my body, because it assumes my lines and forms, but it isn’t me – not when it’s good anyway. It’s something larger and more organic, something more like compost, building up and breaking down. It’s something more like burning old letters, unravelling the stories, returning meaning to source. And when I try to nail this too in words, of course it slips through my fingers and I’m left with just another story. Words close on nothing; there’s just the one hand clapping.

It’s harder to dance when I turn up thinking I have energy than when I turn up thinking I don’t. When I think I don’t, I have small expectations and therefore I’m closer to surrender. The low-energy idea is humble; it looks only for a crust, and so the dance grows itself organically. The high-energy idea is freighted with expectation and desire ... for ecstasy, for catharsis ... which translates into striving and leads me away from the dance that cannot be created but can only reveal itself.

I somehow wobbled back onto the ngondro path. Partly, as soon as I gave myself permission not to do it, I wanted to do it; partly, my energy returned (I wrote the last entry after flu) and it seemed possible to keep all the plates spinning once again. At the same time I retain a sense of the validity of all my objections. The reality is it’s neither one thing entirely, nor the other, and so I’m racketing along veering sometimes one way, sometimes in the other direction. Still, more or less I’m remaining on the road.

There’s a chapter in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism called ‘The Hard Way’. In it Chögyam Trungpa talks about the ‘false heroism’ that we think is the hard way – or the way we should be doing it – but is really another way of feeding the ego with spiritual-ness. It’s the way that we romanticise our practices and ourselves as practitioners, the way we accumulate them, as if by doing so we garner some kind of spiritual merit. My practices have been founded on false heroism in the past, and there’s still a lot of it tangled up with the useful stuff. There’s definitely a lot of false heroism involved in my motivation for doing the ngondro, and that’s part of why it doesn’t feel right.

We can carry this sort of false heroism to great extremes, getting ourselves into completely austere situations. If the teaching with which we are engaged recommends standing on our heads for 24 hours a day, we do it. We purify ourselves, perform austerities, and we feel extremely cleansed, reformed, virtuous. Perhaps there seems to be nothing wrong with it at the time.

Accumulating merit plays on my tendencies to obsession and compulsion. I’ve danced a long slow waltz with these, but I’m heading for the ballroom door now. The ngondro pulls me back into the dance. I’m not finding this helpful.

It’s the practices of the body that truly resonate with me, that have the greatest power to shift me. For years I’ve felt as if I need to ‘graduate’ to practices that are more cerebral, as if some evolution is required. But in 45 years I haven’t evolved away from my body, only more deeply into it, and I’m starting to give faith to my sense that for me there is no evolution in that direction, that the practices of the body offer me everything I need.

Once again, I arrive at a sticking point with the ngondro. I feel as if I should have done it twenty years ago, rather than now, when the form of my practices is dissolving. And this dissolving feels right. For many, many years I’ve been loyal to forms, to the letter of the law of my practices. Now I’m letting everything fall apart a bit. I’m letting all the rules unravel round the edges. I’m allowing things to breathe, expand, sigh, settle. I’m dispersing, feeling my way, letting the stones fall out differently. The ngondro feels like a starting practice. It feels like the boat that launches you. It feels like the daily dozen which, in one form or another, I’ve done for dozens and dozens of days. It feels like the means of establishing a self-discipline, whereas I’m letting my hand fall open and the string run loosely across my palm.

And what keeps me prostrating and chanting is mostly just this damn idiot determination to finish because I’ve started. It doesn’t feel skillful; it feels like a machine that is out of control, like a piston that is driving me, and I don’t seem to be quite able to find the ‘off’ switch. Inside me is a jumped-up tyrant with a big stick always driving me on. And although I’ve often challenged the tyrant, and laughed at his stick, I’ve never quite pushed him off his throne. Why?

Somehow my resistance melts away and I fall into the arms of the practice, of the lineage ... all of it. I embrace the complexity of the Tibetan system. I imagine how practising it will lead me into dusty and far-flung rooms where I will lever open windows to discover a view of rolling lawns.

The thing about the times when it’s like this – when I’m in love with the path and undoubting – is that there’s really nothing to say. The ‘just is-ness’ of it becomes transparent: the condition that is always present and therefore requires no comment, no explication. Perhaps it really is always present underneath the doubt and resistance. I’m not sure. In this kind of space, I feel no conflict between the teachings of hatha yoga and vajrayana, between atman and no-self. At the ultimate destination all things are equal and insubmissible to conceptualisation in words. It doesn't matter to me what other people (even highly realised ones) say about sticking to just one path. I surrender to whatever teachings arrive, from whichever source. And in surrendering I feel (paradoxically, but it always works this way) a fundamental trust in my own judgement, a certainty that the path I'm walking and the way I'm walking is – and will be – just the way it needs to be.

First there’s the question of logic, which seems to be what attracts many people to Buddhism. It is considered to be a logical system of thought. But I don’t trust logic. A lot of things can be proved ‘true’ by logical deduction, some of them pretty nefarious. And when there’s too much emphasis on logic, something else gets left out – intuition, inherent knowing ... whatever you call that. Then there’s the bigness of my emotional response, which doesn’t seem to have space in the middle ground. When I feel joy, I want to dance it, and somehow on this path I feel I have to constrain what I feel, tame it. Then there’s the fact that the Tibetan practices are complex and internal, whereas the practices that most speak to me are simple and physical.

So why am I prostrating and reciting Vajrasattva mantras? What’s motivating me? ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ is a personality trait, not a good reason (and a trait that can end up running me if I’m not mindful of it). I think the most potent reason I continue is that I am touched the beauty of Samye Ling and all that it stands for – an aesthetic that isn’t just scenic but emanates from a particular way of life founded on practice and ethics, a way that is balanced, kind, earthy and good-humoured. Then there’s my desire for community. I always underrate this because my primary drive is to be self-sustaining. But to be human is to be social. I also need to belong.

Samsara and nirvana are not in two different locations. Nirvana pushes up through the pores of samsara. If we don’t love samsara, we’re going to miss nirvana.

1
Where do I set the boundaries in a public journal? How intimate can I allow it to be without feeling I have exposed myself – especially given that my most transformative experiences are bound up with personal relationship? My practices affect my life. They overflow into it, and my life flows back. So if I can’t write with complete intimacy, how useful is it to write here at all?

2
Why do I always end up driving myself ... and then have to let it all run through my fingers, unravelling, unravelling? How do I practise with discipline and yet not wind myself up until I’m bound to the spool?

I understood something new this morning: I am afraid that if I do all these practices, if I get up at 4am every day, if I study Sanskrit and eat properly ... I will become a sort of superwoman – will become the person who lately I feel is sometimes projected onto me by people who know me only by my surfaces. And in becoming this person I will not expand but lose something of myself: my chaotic, ecstatic, out-of-control, passionate, tumultuous part.

On a rational level, I know there’s a problem with my understanding here, because what is the function of practices if not to make us more human? And when we become more human we don’t become more generic but more specifically ourselves. I have witnessed this. Superwoman is a pseud ... and yet on a visceral level she still packs a punch.

When I’ve got mired in inertia I’ve always understood this to be on some level a corrective, a counterbalance to the iron fist I sometimes run myself with. I wonder now if inertia can also be a way to sabotage myself, because on a subtle level I am afraid of what I may become. I invite myself to feel into these questions, but end up tangled in mental speculation.

3
I could say that I have hit resistance to the ngondro again, except that I don’t know whether this is resistance or genuine doubt. I skimmed through the Guru Yoga text and wondered whether I could ever sincerely profess such faith in the Kagyu lineage. There are areas of Tibetan Buddhism that don’t reflect my experience of reality, others where I simply don’t know what is real and probably never will. I could just drink down all my doubts with a large glass of water, but I don’t want to do that. I’d rather hold a space for all my unknowing, but the ngondro is directing me towards a particular view. Yes, it’s true that mahamudra demands that I ask questions, that I carry out my own investigation, but with the objective of arriving at a conclusion that is preconceived. I think I will probably never be able to espouse one belief system wholly and solely. My reality is hanging somewhere between many varieties of truth, like the big speckled spiders on the lemonbalm, who suspend the guy ropes of their webs from many different stems.

Maybe a couple of years ago (it must have been in the winter), I wrote this:

At 5am I arrive on my mat to start my practice. Outside it’s dark. I am setting sail in the lamp-lit cabin of a wooden ship. I slide into black water. The world is silent and all mine. At 6.30 dawn begins to sift down through the rooftops. A light comes on in the house opposite. I’m heading for port but I don’t want to make landfall.

I also wrote this:

Practising is like falling into the arms of an old and trusted lover. Which is to say, it is an intimate experience, full of subtleties and details, a landscape written on the back of my hand.

This being the case – and these are genuine felt impressions – why do I also experience so much resistance to stepping onto my mat? Why do I get an mired in an inertia so boggy and tractile that it feels impossible to resist?

One way I’ve tried responding to the bog is by letting go and allowing it to suck me down, peeling away the framework not just of my practices but also of the other sane and orderly habits that hold up my life – like eating well ... especially that. And there’s a certain satisfaction in surrendering in this way. There’s a kind of tantric aspect too, a thrusting aside of ethical codes: eating the meat, drinking the wine, embracing the ‘impure’, the outlawed, the taboo. It offers a connection with a more roiling and amorphous ground of reality that subsists beneath the elegant structure of the practices and remains eternally insubmissible to order. It’s primal, chaotic, and therefore an essential source of creativity, of lifeblood. But it also feels untenable as a pattern for everyday living.

This is where I start to experience a subtle – or maybe not so subtle – polarisation. I know how easy it would be for me to run my practices like a totalitarian regime. When I read the preceding paragraph I can feel how important connection with the underground is for me, because it speaks to the chaotic, subterranean aspect of myself – the ungovernable, the unpredictable, the crazy. When I reflect upon the dance, which is where my underground gets the chance to erupt and that is the practice (or part of it anyway), I experience no disjunction. I feel how the discipline – of mindfulness, of intense ongoing presence – carries into the chaos ... which resolves itself into the placeless, timeless, shapeless ... the divine ... into what we call by many words but really have no words for. I’m not sure, though, whether I know how to encompass chaos within the framework of my yoga practice, or my sitting practice, or within the practices of the ngondro.

People sometimes object to astanga vinysasa on the grounds that it’s responsible for a lot of injuries. There’s some truth in this. Inexperienced teachers who adjust over-enthusiastically, coupled with A-type students who try to force their bodies into postures, can make for a high-risk combination. Wherever aggression and will predominate over readiness to surrender, there is potential for harm. However, my friend Angela suggests another way of looking at all of this. She says that the gift of astanga is to reveal to us the places where our body is weak or out of balance and then to offer us the opportunity either to heal these places or to create a state of chronic discomfort there. My own experience of practising astanga vinyasa bears out this view.

In Sanskrit the name for the primary series is yoga chikitsa, which is usually translated as ‘yoga therapy’. But yoga chikitsa isn’t therapy in any simple sense. In order to be truly therapeutic the primary series requires of us that we practise it with a little wisdom. Fortunately – paradoxically – a function of yoga chikitsa is that practising it grows our wisdom. That is to say, you may enroll for an astanga class with the intention just of firming your buttocks or feeling a bit less stressed, but quite soon you find that you are learning things about yourself, about your habits and your motivations. You begin to see where you are living in a way that does not truly serve you, and – almost without your willing it – you begin to choose more skillful ways of being.

At one stage I used to refer to my practice as ‘the path of pain’. I was joking, but only a bit. The path of pain was nothing to do with masochism. I tried really hard not to hurt myself, and I got intensely frustrated when I hurt myself anyway. Initially, I did my best to ignore my pain, hoping it would go away. (I had been involved in classical dance, so this way of dealing with discomfort was second nature.) However, the more I tried to ignore my pain, the more it waved its arms around. I have Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, so it’s quite easy for me to injure myself. I didn’t like this. I would watch more robust types pushing their bodies apparently without deleterious effect and resent the fact that when I tried to practise in a similar way I ended up with chronic tendonitis, strained ligaments, subluxations and a torn meniscus. The more I tried to push forwards, the more – in my eyes – I was forced backwards, into a practice increasingly ‘limited’ by injury.

Pain became a path when I started to understand that when I am injured, injury is the practice. Knowing this was one of the key transformational moments of my practice. We work with what is, not with what we wish it were or the way it was yesterday. When I completely embrace the way things are, a shift happens in my orientation. I am on the road of reality. Here, now, step by step, moment by moment. And when the practice is what is, it's no longer just about injury any more. Everything becomes the practice.
That injury is a great teacher is almost a truism, but it took me a while to understand how profound these teachings can be. They are not simply biomechanical in nature but have also to do with how we are in our whole life, as we manifest in our body. Yoga is the mirror that reveals to us the truth about our way of being. The way we hurt ourselves on the mat is the way we hurt ourselves in our life.

For this reason, it seems to me particularly important that we keep practising when we are injured. By this I don’t mean that we should carry on regardless, denying the pain or trying to ‘breathe through it’ – which will only exacerbate the injury. There is no place for this in yoga. Going ‘through’ the pain (in this context, anyway) signifies going beyond, that is, overshooting the place where the work is. It means missing the point and is often a form of avoidance or a symptom of attachment to the practice as a demonstration of physical prowess.

What I do mean is that we simply continue to step onto the mat, with our injury and with our mindful attention, and find appropriate ways of interacting with whatever is happening. This may involve modifying or completely changing our practice. Well, that’s OK. We change or we modify and we embrace all of that. Which means also embracing our reaction to needing to change or modify – our genuine reaction, including the nasty bits that we’d rather sweep under the yoga mat: our anger and our resentment and our sense of loss and our fear ... or whatever it is. If we just stop practising until the problem has (we hope) gone away, we remain forever ignorant of the knowledge that it has to communicate to us. Since this knowledge is always something that we really need to know, the pain will continue to recur, in one form or another, until we pay due attention to it.

Working with injury demands our sensitivity, our honesty and our patience. It demands that we love our injuries, spend time with them, respect them, listen to them. This is what’s happening now; this is the pathway. This is the teaching.

Well, I set up this blog a few days ago but seem to be reluctant to post anything on it. So ... blog, here goes ...

A lot of my resistance around the ngondro has dissolved – at least temporarily – and I'm riding on the momentum of the practices. It's like rushing downstream over the rapids. True, there are still a few lumps of ice bumping up against the raft, but mostly there is this fluid, easy energy. No, I don't expect it will stay like this – that's the nature of impermanence. And sweet though it is to coast on the river, I don't really want to carry on floating; it could become a bit facile. While maybe I can be a little too attached to difficulty, there's a lot of real merit in the obstacles that make me storm and vow to stop practising, because they force me to crawl through difficult holes, and getting stuck and snagged on the brambles is what enables me to understand what's real and where I am deluding myself.

Over the past few months, as I've sat and practised and danced and lived, I've been engaged in observing my own resistance - to everything, on some level. And at some point, while sitting yesterday, I suddenly became aware of the ludicrousness of it – of myself resisting myself, which is what it all boils down to. Because I'm not only the resister – who I identify with – but also whatever I resist against. I think that I am resisting an instruction or a teaching or a norm or an expectation ... But there is no compulsion in the instruction or the teaching or the norm or the expectation. The sense of compulsion is created by my mind, which wants to resist and yet at the same time feels it is being coerced to obey – and which, in some small part of itself, also wants to obey. I create a tyrant, a dogmatist, split myself in two and then rebel against him. The solution is to flow with things a bit more, to be looser, to break down the sharp edges, to allow in shifts and changes and movement. If I unlace the tyrant's corsets, he will dance with the rebel.