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.

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!

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.