on the feast today of St Stephen the Protomartyr, just to let my readers know how much I have to suffer through in my knee rehab process at the gym with my six-foot, 27-year-old trainer..
Beautiful guy, for sure. Upbeat and smart about his work. I come back from the gym aching and exhausted but my knee is much much better. Worth the pain :)
Query: I probably wouldn't go for the vast majority of guys who do yoga for "spiritual" reasons (I'm thinking of starting to do it to improve my flexibility), but something about seeing a shirtless guy doing an asana just does it for me. Thoughts, Herr Doktor? ;)
Western men who do yoga for "spiritual" reasons...I'd be hesitant, too. A lot of what passes for "spirituality" is a flight into an illusion of peace and benevolence without any sense of the arduous effort it takes to transcend "our common humanity" for something both usually good and authentic. As old Dr Jung said, Enlightenment does not consist in imagining figures of light but in making the darkness conscious.
And it would be the rare "spiritual" Yoga man who'd be able to understand, much less respect, your traditional sympathies.
This reminds me of a teacher I had. It was an interesting relationship in an interesting time in my life a long time ago. It was nice but, it is over. Very over. Anyway, he was teaching me proper meditation and he said to me not to visualize anything. When you are meditating for spiritual/mental balance/grounding reasons, you just allow the thoughts to pass you by. Visualizing is just pseudo-intellectual playing pretend.
"Don't be a hippie using imagination to willfully hallucinate fairies." He said to me.
Once you really learn it, it is a skill you can pull out of the tool drawer whenever you want or need it. Sometimes, though, it can indeed feed into your neurosis. It is hardly a panacea. Awareness is the panacea. God, even that sounded like self-help pablum.
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Is that him? ... I'll be in my room.
-Sean
Beautiful guy, for sure. Upbeat and smart about his work. I come back from the gym aching and exhausted but my knee is much much better. Worth the pain :)
Query: I probably wouldn't go for the vast majority of guys who do yoga for "spiritual" reasons (I'm thinking of starting to do it to improve my flexibility), but something about seeing a shirtless guy doing an asana just does it for me. Thoughts, Herr Doktor? ;)
-Sean
Western men who do yoga for "spiritual" reasons...I'd be hesitant, too. A lot of what passes for "spirituality" is a flight into an illusion of peace and benevolence without any sense of the arduous effort it takes to transcend "our common humanity" for something both usually good and authentic. As old Dr Jung said, Enlightenment does not consist in imagining figures of light but in making the darkness conscious.
And it would be the rare "spiritual" Yoga man who'd be able to understand, much less respect, your traditional sympathies.
This reminds me of a teacher I had. It was an interesting relationship in an interesting time in my life a long time ago. It was nice but, it is over. Very over. Anyway, he was teaching me proper meditation and he said to me not to visualize anything. When you are meditating for spiritual/mental balance/grounding reasons, you just allow the thoughts to pass you by. Visualizing is just pseudo-intellectual playing pretend.
"Don't be a hippie using imagination to willfully hallucinate fairies." He said to me.
Once you really learn it, it is a skill you can pull out of the tool drawer whenever you want or need it. Sometimes, though, it can indeed feed into your neurosis. It is hardly a panacea. Awareness is the panacea. God, even that sounded like self-help pablum.
-A
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