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.