Driftwood

Reposted from Alpha Sport LA - http://alphawhat.blogspot.com - check it out!                                   

For the past few weeks I’ve been obsessed with the Deadmau5 song, I Remember. I started doing my morning yoga practice to the song on repeat. Though I usually don’t associate Electronic Dance Music with Sun Salutations, I think that this song presents something important about the idea and feeling of letting go without necessarily moving on or giving up. Something we can all work towards and learn from.

When Kaskade’s words mix with the Deadmau5 beats, there is a perfect atmosphere for release… 

One of the most important aspects of “working out” is that we give ourselves time and space to release all of the tension that has built up in our minds and muscles. We go to the gym to sweat, loose weight, but there’s also something more, something deeper that we achieve when we run, jump, pull up, push up, sit up, downward dog. We give ourselves a chance to forget about everything else that happened in our day, or week, or lives, even if it’s just for an hour. We focus on the present moment. We let go of the attachment to what happened in the past or what will happen in the future.

It can be hard to explain this phenomenon to others or even to recognize it ourselves. I think sometimes the idea of “letting go” can seem oversimplified. We can’t just always release and move away from the things in life that are hard. In life, just like in our work-outs at the gym, if we always stopped when something seemed hard or challenging, we wouldn’t really get any stronger.

“You don’t have to move on to let go…”

Think of how this idea could apply to your life. What ideas, emotions, situations, people, are you stuck on, unable to move away from? Why are you stuck? Maybe you can’t release your job because you need it in order to make money. Maybe you can’t release someone negatively influencing your life because they are family and you have a commitment to them. But is it always necessary to move on to let go?

Sometimes you can find a way to stop being phased or hurt by a situation just by detaching from it. By letting what doesn’t serve you just slide in one ear and out the other without angering or saddening you. By not having expectations of the future or attachments to what happened in the past, you might be able to enjoy a person, place, or part of yourself that you didn’t expect to.

Maybe if you let go of an idea or an emotion that you are attached to then your whole relationship with a certain person or situation will change before your eyes.

“You don’t have to give up to let go…”

How can you manage to keep up all of the difficult and varied components of your life, all of your precious memories of the past, and dreams for the future, while still totally enjoying each and every moment without being clouded by worries, expectations, attachments, fears? How can you remember and let go?

The answer, I think, has something to do with the balance of Sthira (effort) and Sukha (Ease) that a really strong yogi can bring to every yoga pose that they practice. It’s a delicate balance between working your butt off to deepen and strengthen each pose, and to totally release any strain or negativity that holds you back from breathing fully and experiencing and enjoying what you are doing.

 Think of tough situations in life like the last five push-ups in a set of fifty… Maybe you can’t do them because you are about to pull a muscle and you need to just stop. But maybe, if you breathe, focus on the moment instead of on your doubts or fears, you can get through it, do those last five, maybe add on an extra one or two more, maybe even forget about how hard it is, let go, and enjoy it! 

Sentences that smirk at their own flaccid confection, should expect to be forgotten!

"Don't let anyone tell you that it's impossible to prove how one book is better than another. The difference between a major poet and a minor one is that the major poet writes into the density of language while the minor one merely floats on top of it, the same holds for prose writers."

"What's the chief defect that makes Tom Clancy vastly inferior to Nadine Gordimer? The lame inevitability of his language, flogged sentences that disclose a mind incapable of activating self-knowledge or delighting in analogues, and a pandering to the simplistic and reductive, which is precisely how propaganda works."

Expanding

Yoga is movement and yoga is stillness. Yoga is an old practice, a shared practice, with history and guidelines and beliefs, but also, yoga is a very private and current place inside myself, where I know that I can go to be free from the rest of the world. Yoga is a practice that manages to embody many juxtapositions, making it a hearty thing, with so much room for growth and exploration.

9.

In the Neolithic era, which came before, hunting is depicted on cave walls. But that was not language? That was not the same?

10.

A photograph of a man wearing yellow sports shorts, waving up a high hand to an invisible person on the third story balcony.

Invisible to the man waving? That’s one thing.

Invisible to the viewer of the image only, and we assume that the one receiving the wave is simply out of the frame?

5.

 “Yeah. Yeah. Nice,” A many says to his cell phone three times in a row. “Yeah. Yeah. Nice… Yeah. Yeah. Nice.”

Writing systems are distinguished from symbolic communication systems in that one must understand the associated spoken language to understand the text.

 6.

Yes. Animal societies use symbolic communication. Bees. Squirrels. Elephants. More.

A girl eating chips out of the trunk of her black Toyota.

7.

 Keys jingling from a knuckle.

8.

 Places where the writing of language is speculated to have been developed, independently.

3200 BCE Mesopotamia

600 BCE Mesoamerica

1200 BCE China

3200 BCE Egypt

3.

Five women in one half hour in straw brimmed hats.

Writing is defined as a symbolic representation of language.

One UPS delivery.

One clothes donation pick up of two filled paper bags.

One couple moving four chairs and a kitchen table from their car into their second

floor apartment which causes a loud bang in the stairwell.

Images are defined as pictures representing concrete objects.

4.

Seven very small dogs on leashes, smaller then three lined up fists.

Three people on i-phones complaining of bad service.

Only eight cars. Three parallel parked within my range of visibility.

It has been observed throughout history that writing systems change and evolve more slowly then their symbolic and oral counterparts.

2.

1.

A man wearing yellow sports shorts, waving up a high hand

    to an invisible person on the third story balcony. Invisible to me.

A walking conversation between strangers:

What happened over there?