Masso and Orangecarbon have my permission to post this article to the Orangecarbon website.  Enjoy!

Graciously,

Erin Chi

Thank you Erin Chi, enlightening and centering..masso July 14 2010

It is challenging to make sense of a place that I love because if its disgusting attributes.  Though sometimes it stretches my patience to its very limits, the outcome of every escapade is a deep learning and gratitude for the growing pains inflicted.  India has been good to me, it has softened my hard parts and hardened my soft areas--thus granting me a sort of balance that cannot be found in seeking; a balance that can only be achieved by acquiescing to life.  India encourages one to give up, to give self to the higher powers and to believe that all is for the best.

From this land of pain, powerlessness, filth, love, bliss and beauty comes a system of well being and beliefs that is based on a person performing daily the practices necessary to one’s individual nature, spending quiet still time each day allowing thoughts of past and future to lift, allowing life to go on around with no personal interference and using the tools available to attend the divine nature in every aspect of being.  India's pervasive doctrine allows a person who does not perform correctly, to try again and again until they get it right, until they do everything they need to do—even if it takes endless lifetimes, they will eventually go to the next different place and have a whole new set of concerns.  Though people will have something to say about the way that others live because the culture is nosey, theoretically every person’s idea of what they need to do is correct, every belief system is welcome, each human plight is acceptable because it is part of one’s individual path.  One cannot do anything other than that which they are doing.  Nothing is bad or good, everything just is.

Like taking a bath in a dirty pond, I have escaped the heat of hell and cleansed myself of attachment to that which no longer serves me in the cool, polluted water.  I emerge fresh, cleaner than I was—or at least differently dirty and perhaps smelling funny to those who think they can afford to ignore the putrid bath.  I am free of affectation by so many things that once disturbed me, like waiting, fear of getting hit by cars, human faeces, being told no, my own inability to focus, my perceived shortcomings, physical discomfort, and lack of amenities.  The most beautiful women I’ve ever seen dripping with jewellery and beautiful saris emerge from dilapidated shacks or jump off of the back of a truck to dance through puddles of sewage collecting cow chips and sorting through garbage.  It is impossible to find intolerable that which a hundred people around me will happily endure. 

Most of the people here are in survival mode.  They are happy to have food on the table, electricity, their loved ones around them, occasional treats.  I came here with a huge list of necessary comforts that I’ve since abandoned.  After living in mud huts that are luxurious compared to the tin shacks down the street, I am comfortable sleeping anywhere.  After months of cold showers using a bucket, I no longer crave long hot showers or baths.  I used to feel squeamish at the notion of spreading the usage of toilet implements (brushes, buckets, etc) to wider fields or touching certain things or walking near human excrement—though there was no physical contact with faeces, human discharge in general, eating food that had been left out or cooked in a dirty kitchen, etc.  After having no choice but to suffice with the community hole in the ground and make-shift plastic cup in a bucket of water for cleaning that had never been washed, hugging lepers and eating food that they made for me, stepping over a beach full of morning poops to join my friends in an ocean swim, walking in the dark through fields infested with black cobras, drinking the most amazing fresh squeezed juice on the planet out of a glass recently used by any number of strangers and barely washed in a bucket-full of questionable water, I understand that I am not physically affected by many things that bother my intellect.

Tantrics are thought of as witches here in India.  If some villagers’ children get ill and husband loses his job, it will be assumed that they have been cursed by a Tantric.  Movies portray them as vicious malevolent, skull-wearing, psychotic priests with yellow finger nails and googling eyes, who will curse you and steal your babies.  The Indian stigma against Tantrics comes from the Agora Tantrics who take this idea of basking in everything to an extreme.  These are the guys that are running around naked, covered in ash of corpses, holding up a left arm for twelve years, pulling a jeep around with a penis, abstaining from eating or they eat anything that comes their way.  They take their understanding of enlightenment from preoccupation with a source of divinity that strings everything together and perhaps people are afraid of them because they are wild, powerful--as this ability to see God in everything is a great source of power.  

As we age we accumulate and pass on to our progeny a set of pre-existing conditions, requirements, opinions, apprehensions, pre-conceived notions and judgements that cloud reality.  Many people find that their life becomes consumed and composed by a series of fear-based aversion or cravings based on their own past experiences or the things they’ve heard from others.  This prevents one from receiving life as it is, for each moment is new and there is no way to guess how something might act or feel.  This also adds stress, fatigue and disease as energy is lost in an effort to avoid or control many aspects of the flow; it is kindred to swimming upstream.  After a bit of research one will understand that Tantra is the practice of accepting life as it is, avoiding dichotomy between good and bad, abandoning judgement as much as possible to reveal the world as a child might see it...Everything is confronted as if for the first time.  This is actually the closest view of reality and the highest form of optimism—to allow curiosity to supersede fear.

 I am a huge advocate for finding a teacher and studio where one feels at home and devoting oneself to an informed practice of yoga, for this gives a person a knowledge of different asanas, pranayama, meditations, mantras and understanding of proper alignment—a set of tools necessary to safely explore and to heal themselves.  A good instructor is often able to tune into the needs of the classroom and wonderful heights can be reached collectively.  At some point one has to use what they have learned.  I developed a dependence on classes with an instructor to guide and others around to compare myself to.  I learned everything that I know about asana from these circumstances and was weary of letting them go, for when practicing alone I felt like a deer in headlights at the prospect of being able to do any type of movement that I want to.  Even when I became an instructor, I would channel the universal everything for my class and experience great juju with everyone, but was somehow afraid to really do this just for myself.

In India it is difficult to deny an exploration of my own practice.  While I have had the opportunity to study with some wonderful teachers, my most profound learning experiences about yoga in India have happened while practicing on my own.  The understanding that I am here, where the Rishis originally developed the yoga system, has given me license to listen deeply to my own inklings; to take time every day to follow the whispers of my inner voice while omitting the ego as much as possible.  At this point in my study of yoga I understand that an asana practice is simply time put aside to move as the body wants to move, to open and cleanse the energy channels that want to be opened in preparation for meditation and to make it possible to find bliss in a variety of postures. 

My practice in solitude feels more like a true asana practice.  It begins and ends when I want it to and it amplifies to a degree that is comfortable for me on that day.  It is good for a beginner to be encouraged to move beyond their fear and to explore their true physical limits, but many people in this situation get competitive or hard on themselves and push in wrong directions for want of acknowledgement from peers.  This is absolutely not asana practice; this is aerobics, gymnastics, and ego-stretching.   A true asana practice is based on compassion and curiosity about the state of the body; sometimes the body will feel energetic, strong and want to be pushed, stretched; other times it feels tired, weak and it wants to be nurtured, breathed into, energized, and loved. 

There is a string of energy that pulsates into every part of our being—every part of our presence on this earth that we can imagine.  The point of asana is to bring that energy into the parts that aren’t getting enough and meditation is simply to see every part of the universe inside as it is now.  When we go too far into a posture, the first thing that happens is the good feelings stop pouring into the appendages involved, then our breath stops or gets shallow, we feel apprehensive, we feel danger.  If one eases up at the point before this happens (and this point changes every day) and sends love, nurturing to those parts through those open channels, they will find a stronger presence from members involved and an ability to go deeper later; they will find that during meditation, they are able to explore that area of the body with greater clarity—which is the purpose of asana in the first place.  If one pushes beyond that stopping point, they will find that injury occurs and that place closes off energetically in an effort to heal itself without interference from ego—a force turned malevolent by its over-reaching breadth of influence.

One of my teachers told me that to prevent depression, I must do sun salutations every day to appease the sun.  So my personal practice started with a vow to do at least six sun salutations on the beach at sunset and to meditate every day even just a little bit.  This seemed an easy vow to fulfil, but I find any such vow to be quite challenging.  Sometimes I put off these sun salutations and am forced to do them quickly, sluggishly, with a full stomach—but I do them with compassion and always feel better, reconnected because of them. Other times a hankering for other poses pops up within the sun salutations and my practice lasts for hours and my body does amazing things—drawing energy in from outlandish places and like an alchemist, passing it through my being in different ways, turning it to gold and spreading it out to the ends of the earth.  I meditate sometimes before asana practice, where I get visions of the poses that my body wants and sometimes after asanas where I could explore the changes that have been made, the wild open energy channels and vibrations—functioning much like a prolonged savasana.

The longer I keep this daily practice of listening to the universe, the more intricate my practice becomes; I began to develop new poses, to understand how to fit various aspects of the practice together, to realize why pranayama, mantra, meditation, etc. are necessary.   I’ve read many books and heard many theories, but nothing compares to the learning received from my own practice.  This practice is a play time, like a healing time—where I can do anything I want with no requirements and my body becomes something mysterious and interesting, something new every day to explore.  With this great compassion, I have been able to touch my foot to extremities that I hadn’t imagined before, but also the smallest movements become infinitely beautiful, deeply challenging and opening.  This pervades other factions of life until everything becomes the first of its kind that I have encountered, a source of great entertainment, something to be regarded with understanding. This ability to look with compassion and healing at the intricacies of my inner world extends itself to the people and things that I touch with senses or perception, encouraging an ever-deepening understanding of my environment and a stronger ability to treat it as it wants to be treated.  An effort to confront life with curiosity, innocence and no judgement, I believe, is what originally gave way to the concept of Tantra.

 It has been established that matter is ultimately composed of various combinations of the same sorts of particles.  If we wish to be pure in thought and free from the misery of confusion, we cannot then react to some things with aversion and other things with desire, for it is all essentially the same.  So this leaves us with a choice, we must either avoid pleasure and enjoyment of our senses—the doctrine of the ascetic, or we must embrace everything that comes at us equally-the basis of Tantric practice.  Both methods provide us with the ability to face anything with equanimity, leaving us unaffected by this system of love and hate, pain and comfort, bliss and agony, thus attaining a heaven on this disgusting beautiful planet, living in a world that just is. 

The simple practice of setting aside time to be open will lead one to many understandings, bring new practices and deepen one’s ability to feel.  For some people this may mean getting rid of everything owned and retreating to the mountains or running naked screaming through the city streets eating poop and sleeping with dead bodies, for others it may entail devoting oneself entirely to their family, or their cat, or their job scrubbing floors— God lives in everything.  It is said that there are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people, or beings. People don’t usually come from elsewhere to India and find enlightenment, they come to India to learn how to look, how to appreciate what they have and then they find enlightenment in their day to day life. A guru can inspire and help a person begin to explore their inner universe, but it is the guru that lives inside of each one of us and acceptance of that which composes life which will show the way to liberation from bondage.

My wife and I have come to Pondicherry in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue, and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45 a.m. There are 20 or so of us, nearly all from France.

Ajit, in his 70s now, grew up in this famous ashram with his parents, who went into the retreat founded and inspired by the yogi and guru Sri Aurobindo and his vision of universal consciousness and peace. In this idyllic world, Ajit learned everything from ballet to track to gymnastics, but especially yoga, a skill he has taught with acclaim for decades both in India and in France. His official retirement since 2003 is a fiction of contentment.

It’s the school he’s building that keeps him going, in addition to being in top form himself. We, the chosen students, by contrast, can barely see straight in the shadowy dawn as the bus heads off through Pondicherry. For the first few blocks the streets have French names: Rue Dumas, Rue Suffren, Rue Romain Rolland. Then we leave town and head south over fetid canals and clogged streams, through trash-heaped neighborhoods thumping with all-night Hindu festival music while men in dhotis stand around sipping tea out of plastic goblets. Cows with brightly painted red and green horns meditate in the middle of the road as we plunge into the lush Tamil Nadu countryside.

Vellai Thamarai: imagine going to a school named White Lotus. It’s not yet entirely finished but is supposed to be by January. Nearly every villager in Cinna Kattupalayam lines the road to greet our bus with cries of hello and bonjour. On a Monday morning, the children are beside themselves at the prospect of going to school. There are enough smiles for a thousand mornings.

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall, thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot — but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.

There’s a blessed break around 9 to boat a mile or so down a green stream, which takes us to the sea for an hour’s swim in view of a towering blue Hindu temple. The coast here was struck hard by the tsunami in 2004. In the tiny Pondicherry district alone about 600 lives were lost. But the 10-meter, or nearly 35-foot, waves didn’t roll up to the future site of Vellai Thamarai, and the village was spared the worst.

By the time we return, school classes are under way, and the air rings with voices of children shouting out their ABCs. The young Tamil teachers in dazzling saris instruct the little ones to greet the visitors as we fill the classroom doors and windows. A few of them are still crying for their parents who’ve left them for the day. One or two sleep soundly on mats, others sip warm milk and sugar, still others reach out to shake our hands.

Classes in Indian culture, taught by Ajit or his wife, Selvi, guide us through the thickets of marriage, life in the Aurobindo ashram, techniques of meditation and the Hindu pantheon. We discuss the future of the school, how the rice and bananas growing on adjacent fields help the bottom line, how financing from the government is sparse and how much the project depends on donors. The director of the school works without pay. He and the social worker and even the building superintendent follow the guiding principle of sharing the labor; many a midday found all of them squatting in the kitchen with the cooks snapping green beans or peeling onions and ginger. Hierarchy counts for nothing here; helping one another is everything.

It is a balanced community working toward the same goal: educating children to rise above a dirt-floor existence. Families of four in Cinna Kattupalayam get by on 125 rupees, or less than $3, a day. Most parents are agricultural laborers. A half day’s weeding, from 6 a.m. to noon, in the rice paddy earns a woman about 60 rupees; men building the school make slightly more. Women carrying sand and bricks on their heads to the roof stop and watch the Westerners struggle with yoga and ask us to take their photos with our digital cameras.

In the afternoon the children continue their classes, and the yoga initiates rest a while. Older kids with siblings in the school come around after the city bus drops them off and query us about France and America, then pose for pictures and show off the yoga positions they’ve picked up. Selvi teaches a class in Indian music; others take a dance course and learn the precise, spine-defying steps of a classical south Indian art. All the culture notwithstanding, it’s hard not to fall asleep in the thick heat and dream.

Our afternoons at Vellai Thamarai wind down through exercises to relax the body and mind, and then a regimental workout until 6, with Ajit pushing us all to the tips of our muscles. The schoolteachers and nurse come up and join us, which makes for a lot of laughter as Ajit tacks between French and English to keep us all on our toes. But it’s the tricky headstands that truly challenge us all, despite Ajit’s reverent description of the ease with which Nehru practiced this healthy habit.

The short, brutish trip back to town is another unforgettable piece of India. Our bus passes others dangerously, and the others pass, too: tons of steel packed with innocents hurtle straight at each other until the last second. It is an articulate game of chicken played out with nonstop honking but never any gesticulating and no vulgarities. Only the Westerners clutch their chests.

At day’s end, there’s no energy left for anything but a cold shower and a check of the seaside view. It might be 9 o’clock. Waves roll in. Men and women stroll the shore together, and now and then you can hear a bottle break. I picture the school, still not done, out there in the tropical dark, a drop in the ocean of all India’s needs, but for all that it is everything.

As I fall into bed, I hear the innumerable crows. They go on late into the night, along with deep laughter of men and rusty strains of music and crackling volleys of firecrackers. Only much later, about 3 a.m., does it truly get quiet: the only time, they say, that anyone in India can hear to think. I sit up. I listen, and it’s as though I’ve never listened before.

 

Club on East 57th Street was comfortably full. A dozen people sat, their chins pointed toward the ceiling, their lips puckered as if 
preparing for a kiss. 



Bringing the Double Chin to Heel (March 29, 2007) 


Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Annelise Hagen leads the class. 
Later, they took their index and middle fingers and tapped their mouths five times, with the hope of increasing lip fullness and color. 
If done each day, they were told, it would be just as if they had been injected with collagen.

“The resistance is what firms the muscles,” Annelise Hagen, the teacher, said of Revita-Yoga, which combines yoga and facial 
exercises and is billed as a way to combat frown lines, wrinkles and sagging. “Each pose, stretch or exercise is designed to relax 
the muscles and release the patterns people unconsciously etch into their skin.” 

Want to sculpture and narrow your nose? Alternate breathing out of each nostril, Revita-Yoga teaches. Have crow’s-feet? 
Open the eyes wide to smooth the lines. 
As pale as the winter sky? A dose of downward dog can add color to the complexion while oxygenating the skin. 

In an era when aging is treated as a disease and yoga is often touted as a cure-all, it is hardly surprising to see people combining 
the two. 
Classes are sprouting up all over the United States and so are books, marketed to the portion of the population that wants the 
benefits of the knife and the needle without the costs or the risks.

That it works is unlikely, say doctors who specialize in skin or facial physiology. But it does relax practitioners while 
playing into their desire to do something about perceived flaws in their skin.

“People want a healthy alternative to looking good without artificial substance,” said Ms. Hagen, a former actress whose book, 
“The Yoga Face,” is to be published this August by Avery, the health and wellness division of Penguin. “
And they want to be in control of their appearance rather than relegating it to an authority. I’m teaching my students to 
consciously release muscles rather than paralyzing them, which is what Botox does.”

The idea of merging exercise and beauty is not new. Beauty magazines have long carried how-to articles on firming up the face. 
But the concept seems to have become imbued with new energy in the last year.

Frownies and jowlies are under attack at the Lake Austin Spa Resort in Austin, Texas, where guests are led through a series of 
23 facial movements meant to release facial tension, lift droopy mouth corners and iron forehead wrinkles. 

The Kapiolani Health Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, has six two-hour sessions designed to create “balanced facial symmetry” 
while revitalizing and rejuvenating skin.

Gary Sikorski, who is certified in yoga facial toning, gives his Happy Face workshop in the Atlanta area. In a phone interview, 
Mr. Sikorski sounded, well, quite happy. He had just seen a graduate of his course, and, he said, “she had been practicing a lot 
on her own, and she looked amazing! 
The corners of her mouth were turned up, she looked younger and was absolutely glowing.”

The latest six-session series, he said, drew 25 seekers of his guidance for stimulating 57 muscles in the face, neck and scalp. 
Mr. Sikorski sent them home with a 33-page booklet, a CD and fact sheets on nutrition and vitamins. “Folks are realizing the 
face has muscles and that there’s a substitute to plastic surgery that costs less and can achieve similar results,” he said.

Much less: At $250, his class is a bargain when compared with a laser peel, which runs around $600.
 
masso footnote. In our gatherings, I urge the class to form a Lion pose; 
Sit on the floor between your heels and place your palms of your hands on your knees and open your fingers as 
wide as possible. 
Squeeze your knees together and bring them as close as possible.
Straighten your back and push your chest forward as far as possible curving your back outwards. 
Hold your neck up, open your mouth and eyes as wide as possible and stick your tongue out. 
Look forward, cross your eyes back and forth, hold position, flash schwasana (little room) , up to six slow breath, in from 
your nose out from your mouth. 
Keep your tongue out as far as possible. Relax and repeat 4 times.
This pose will adjust your facial muscles as well as other benefits.  Namaste