July Dispatch: “It is in the unexpected place that you will find The Lobster.”
Happy mid-summer, Galaxy Beauties. I just came back from a stunning weekend yoga retreat at Red Clover Ranch in the Wisconsin Driftless region, and the group, the yoga, the surroundings, and the hospitality and food have put me in a pretty magically grateful space.
I was asked many times over the weekend if I had visited the ranch before booking the retreat, or if I knew Annie (the proprietress) or Dani (the wildly talented chef) before booking. The answer, surprisingly, was no - I went off of the recommendation of Galaxy studio friend, Alexandria, and the vibes I got from one zoom meeting with Annie.
And I’m not really a vibes person. But I do know when I’ve found something special, because i AM a dedicated seeker. You might call me a yogic crate digger, if you’re into record collecting metaphors. And I am an experienced practitioner of what we call in yoga “neti, neti,” which translates as “not this, not this.” What I am often seeking is something that is a little outside of the norm.
I was in full crate-digging mode when I was reading the Hatha Yoga Pradipika one time a few years ago, because I was SO VERY TIRED of seeing and hearing the same re-hashes of the Yoga Sutras, which are an important text of yoga, but also a tiny representation of the huge catalog of yogic texts. If I had to hear one more person talk about the meaning of Santosha and the Yamas and Niyamas, I felt a little like I was going to scream. I felt a little like I feel when “Drops of Jupiter” comes on the speakers at Target and I want to understand why anyone continues to listen to this song and wtf this guy is even singing about.
So I was reading the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, because people don’t talk about it a lot, and it’s really weird, and I like weird. And I came upon these verses:
KHAMADHYE KURU CATMANAM ATMAMADHYE CA KHAM KURU
SARVAM CA KHAMAYAM KRTVA NA KIMCIDAPI CINTAYET
ANTAH SUNYO BAHIH SUNYAH SUNYAH KUMBHA IVAMBARE
ANTAH PURNO BAHIH PURNAH PURNAH KUMBHA IVARNAVE
Place the self in the middle of space, and space in the midst of self.
Reducing everything to the nature of space, think of nothing else.
Void within, void without, void like a pot in space.
Full inside, full outside, full like a pot in the ocean.
Hatha Yoga Pradipika, 4:55-56
I was shook. I was obsessed with the imagery, the usage of the word space, how it played with ideas of emptiness and fullness, and the rhythm of it in Sanskrit. I’ve read the Yoga Sutras so many times, and I love them, but I’ve never felt the electric shock of connection and intrigue that I felt when I read this verse. I felt like I feel when I’m wandering through a giant used bookstore and I find a book that I never knew I was looking for, but I obviously always needed. I felt like I felt when I found the Exuma record for the first time. I felt like I felt when Paul Wyatt and Eric Day played “O Comely” for me at a party one night in Ann Arbor.
And that feeling is: if this is the kind of thought, art, and music that exist in the world - so unexpected, compelling, beautiful, boundary-pushing and weird, why would I accept anything else?
John O’Donohue has a snippet in his book “Anam Cara” where he talks about this. He says that in the fishing villages of Connemara, they have a phrase: ‘is fánach an áit a bhfaighfeá gliomach’ - “It is in the unexpected place that you will find the lobster.” O’Donohue talks about how that unexpected place might be one’s own practice with solitude - which I have written about before, and will probably write about again this winter. But it also means that looking, thinking, seeking, and appreciating outside the box will reap rewards for you - whether it’s a lobster, or a mind-blowing song, or a new understanding of yogic philosophy.
So we’re diving into what I am calling “B-Sides and Rarities” this month at the Galaxy. When I was introducing the idea to my teachers, I said that even teaching from a text like the Bhagavad Gita would be a good start.
There are a ton of really interesting yogic texts to dive into, starting with the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Gheranda Samhita, and the Shiva Samhita, which are considered by many yogic scholars to be the three most “classic” or foundational texts to hatha yoga, and hardly ever read or discussed in yoga in the West.
I’m also really intrigued by the third book of the Yoga Sutras, which is seldom taught and discussed, as it mostly talks about the siddhis, which are the yogic superpowers that might come to a dedicated practitioner of yoga. It’s hard to talk about that book, because it flies in direct contradiction to concepts outlined in the first two, but you know me and cognitive dissonance.
This idea of seeking out culture and ideas that lies outside of the normal streams of consumption is actually something that I view as vitally important, because it allows us to get to know ourselves and our world in a way that is incredibly intentional and possibly even anti-capitalist. And I think we can all agree that the coolest kids in high school were often not the popular kids, right? That idea extends to almost everything. It’s worth it to examine WHY you like something, and if you’re making that choice for yourself, or because someone or something (like Instagram) fed it to you and told you that everyone else likes it. Making a bold choice, or an offbeat choice, or doing a little extra work to find something that hits with a greater, deeper, more sparkly resonance is worth it.
About 15 years ago, I took an immersion in a lesser-known tantric style of yoga, and the facilitator told this story about the founder of this yoga style. He had heard about yogic forms that crossed over into some of the martial forms indigenous to India, and was looking for teachers in India who would teach him. The process of finding a teacher was basically the opposite of what we do today - he had to find the teacher and wait to see if the teacher would take him as a student. At the workshop, they described showing up at a mountain home and waiting outside (we’re talking days). Sometimes, a teacher would come out, look at this man, and go back inside, which meant that he had been refused as a student. Can you imagine if it were that hard to get to a yoga class? I’m not saying that we should all have to go through that to learn yoga, but I do think there is something to be said to working a little harder to seek something out, and claim it as your own.
Seeking out the unexpected places and people and lobsters is the ultimate practice of knowing yourself - because you have fought to find yourself in a way that many people never do.
Dostoevsky says, “A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life’s obedience, attain to perfect freedom—that is, freedom from himself—and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves.”
Or as Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Or as Jeff Mangum says in his 8-minute magnum opus:
“Say what you wanna say
And hang for your hollow ways
Moving your mouth to pull out all your miracles aimed
For me.”
And for the love of all that this holy, don’t stop watching this video before you hear the horn and the saw kick in.
I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine,
Anna
What I’m Reading…
We’ll be reading this together, since I haven’t quite started this book yet - Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka. I heard Chayka interviewed about this book a few months ago, and felt like he was verbalizing many things I struggle to come to terms with as a business owner who has to partially rely on Instagram for her marketing reach - and frequently gets little to no engagement on the posts that I like the best (my aesthetic is not IG’s aesthetic, I’m learning…). Is personal taste and personal freedom on the Internet an illusion? This book dives into how our digital footprint, likes, dislikes and culture consumption are mined for money, and slowly manipulated, resulting in a flattening of culture that I obviously have lots of feelings about (if you read through all the words above this, you’ll know…). Chayka’s stance is that we have the ability to fight back against culture flattening - but I’ll report back more once I’ve read it. You know how to contact me if you have thoughts on this book, or have already read it.
