Wouldn’t that be cool?

But hold on.  What the heck am I talking about?  Okay, for you non-yogis, the mula-bandha is like the invisible asana.  It’s the root lift, or root lock, and it is described in various ways from ‘a slight lifting around the area of the cervix’ to ‘try to crack a walnut with your anal sphincter.’  No, I am not kidding.  Yes, yogi-people do their asana while ‘tightening,’ ‘lifting,’ or ’squeezing’ the pelvic floor, otherwise known as down there.

If this sounds strange, that’s because it is.

But damn if the whole root lock thing hasn’t been making good for me lately.  As I have mentioned, earlier in the summer I went to a David Williams workshop, and David, relaying Pattabhi Jois’s instructions—so, if you’re listening to me, you’re on the end of a serious game of yogi-telephone here—said the most important thing he had been taught to focus on, before breath, and way before asana, was the mula bandha.  Basically, he suggested cranking the heck out of it, and you’ll be getting it somewhere in there.  Also, it’s a two-fer, because if you really grab hold of your mula bandha, you’ll get the  the Uddianna bandha, the lower abdominal lock, at the same time.  Aaaand, you get more of the mental focus thing, too, the meditative state, because if you stop thinking about doing the mula bandha for a split second, it lets go.  You have to focus on it to keep it—that’s dharana, concentration.  Mula Bandha, it’s so much more than tightening your ass!

Um, anyway, along with many other things I shifted in my practice after the workshop, I began really focusing on this this summer, and perhaps it is paying off because—

Pow!

Chatarunga, with mula and uddianna bandhas locked and loaded, is like floating.  It does not feel like an arm/chest strength thing at all.  It feels effortless.

Balance poses feel rock steady.

Jumping slows down with greater control.

Sweat—finally, the promised sweat!—starts beading up on my skin.  Tapas!  Purification!  You will be mine!

Alignment is automatically improved.

And here’s the big one:  I don’t get tired.

Wtf?

I’m telling you, I don’t understand it…but it’s magic.

I no longer go for an occasionally remembered twinge of a subtle lift down there. No.  Now, I squeeze everything I can get ahold of (not contracting the glutes, of course), triple zipped, like some kind of freaky leather bondage corset, boom, sealed, and shazam, I swear to Shiva, I become Super-Yogini.

I mean, compared to my non-mula-bandha-sorta-pathetic-but-trying-hard-yogini-self, that is.

I don’t know why it works, but it does.  I do not lie.

Forget alignment, forget pushing, forget adjustments, for a while anyway, and spend three months or so focusing on this one thing like crazy and see what happens.  Just as an experiment.  Tell me how it goes.  I’ve only been at this ashtanga yoga gig for little over a year.  David said, hey, it takes a decade to really get a handle on the bandhas.  So…if I’m at 10% Bandha Strength now, I’ll be climbing freaking skyscrapers with my teeth by the time I hit 50.

Or, at the very least, I won’t be needing any adult diapers.

“Lightbulb.”

Despicable Me wasn’t playing at our usual, local theater, so we had to drive a bit to a mega-mall super mondo cineplex with umpteen million theaters and people stationed everywhere to direct the milling throngs to the appropriate screen.  It was like an airport.  But that was all new and fun and we ate popcorn and had a ball. Have you noticed a bunch of movies lately with lovable villain-protagonists?  Phineas and Ferb’s Heinz Doofenshmirtz, for example.  He’s one of our favorites.

Dominating the Tri-State Area since 2009

Afterward, we found ourselves wandering the mega-mall, a bit like we had found ourselves suddenly on an alien planet.  First thing, of course, was buying chocolate, three gorgeous truffles, raspberry, cherry, and cappuccino—they came with handwipes, how cool is that?

They looked just like this.  I nearly wet myself.

Next came the giant Barnes and Nobel, so big it had escalators and a toy section.  The kids looked at everything, and I mean everything, and Luc declared that when he was grown up, this would be his house and all these books would be his, and he would never have to go home because he would already be there.

Chez Luc

Finally, we found ourselves at the Apple store.  Oh la la.  There must have been a hundred people in there.  Most of the place was taken up with demo model iphones, ipods, imacs, ibooks, and [cue holy music] ipads.  (What does the ‘i’ stand for?  Information?  Idiot?  Icky?  Inedible?  Or is it the first person pronoun maybe?  As in, i’s all about me, I mean ‘I‘?)

Here’s the thing: the kids both picked up ipads and instantly were driving them around like pros.  Zip zip their fingers flew across the screen and there was Sophie, looking at a lovely, color illustrated Winnie the Poo.  Luc was instantly playing Zombies Vs. Plants.  ZERO learning curve, just, boom, they were in.  I’m telling you, this thing is PERFECT for kids.  It’s the perfect kid size, shape, interface, and it fits right in their small hands or lap with this durable feeling touch screen instead of, say, a flimsy feeling hinge joint you get on a laptop. I turn around and now Sophie is doing a drawing of cats, and I finally get my hands on another demo-model and oh my god, I want one.

“You know you want it.”

I know I have talked of my love of my ipod touch, so I guess it makes sense that an ipod touch on steroids would be dazzlingly appealing, but wow.   I stood there rationalizing at lightspeed, smoke coming out of my ears with the effort. We could drop our tv service down to zip and the kids could watch their shows on Hulu or Netflix on the ipad, so really, it would pay for itself.  This is a homeschooling tool.  So really, it’s for the children.  And it would be wonderful for reading.  I could write with it, bank with it, entertain the kids with it.   Together we could rule the world.

We, too, could be lovable villains!

I WANT ONE!

No 3G, just the maximum memory wi-fi version.  That’s all.  I’m a simple person with simple needs.

I’m telling myself I’m waiting for the 2nd gen to come out because you know they’re going to put a camera on it or something that will just make the 1st gen seem so antiquated.  But really, I have no money for this thing, none.  Dentist bills, and property taxes, how I curse you!

There isn’t even a date set for 2nd gen so I can probably distract myself for the foreseeable future.  I just have to stay away from the apple store and those blasted demo-models.  Ah, the pitfalls of attachment and desire.

But no.  I will be strong.  I will.

(Ipad, you will be mine!  Oh yes….)

First there was this cute, little, totally terrified dog that Cesar took to live at his place (I think?) where there are all these other dogs. The little scared one ended up getting taken under the paw by another of the dogs and sort of re-socialized, or maybe socialized for the first time, by the other dogs. It was pretty cool, I thought. There was something about her walking on a treadmill that I didn’t understand, but I was impressed with how kind Cesar seemed to be to the little dog, never behaving in a threatening manner to her, for example, making himself low and crawling backwards towards her, so that she wouldn’t be scared, or making a safe place for her to go to when she was nervous, so she wouldn’t have to hide. The kids and I were all happy when this transformed, not-very-scared-at-all, dog was reunited with her owner.

The second part of the show was about a private company that used dogs trained to sniff out explosives. The dogs did great while they were on the job, but when they weren’t working, they were all enemies, causing all this stress for the owners who had to walk them all separately, feed them all separately, etc. Cesar comes in, and there is some of that stupid reality-tv over-dramatization going on, but he comes in and says look, these dogs are all hyped up. They can’t relax. It’s all work work work. Which was pretty much the deal with the owner. So Cesar sets about getting the dogs to relax by walking them with no job to do, no destination. He keeps adding dogs until there are four or five of them, walking along. The main thing I was struck by was his extremely confident, relaxed manner. He’s a little guy, and these were huge dogs, German Shepards, dogs that had been attacking each other, and he goes in like it’s nothing. Maybe the show hyped that up, but still, his manner, walking along with the dogs, was all confident relaxation. The other dog handlers were impressed, too, and the one guy who was so Go Go Go looked taken aback, like oh, wow, I don’t know how to relax either.

Anyway, we were impressed. It was tv, so who knows what was edited or cut, but taking it at face value, I thought, huh. This guy seems interesting. So we looked him up.

Wow, what a lot of controversy! The American Human Association has issued a statement on this guy saying his methods are cruel and asking The National Geographic channel, which airs the program, to cancel it! The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior has said his show and books have set dog training back twenty years! Ten minutes on google and I had run across dog trainer after dog trainer that hated him, his work, his methods, the whole package.

Well, that was unexpected. Seems he uses aversion to correct dogs, which I didn’t see much of in the one episode, but yeah, maybe he used his energy to say “stop it” a lot, or gave the dogs a poke here or there to get them to quit whatever they were doing (I’m thinking of the second group, not the little afraid dog). Modern dog training is all about positive reinforcement, it turns out. Behaviorist stuff. Skinner. Treats and praise and clickers, with no punishments, force or coercion, which, apparently, this Cesar guy uses a fair amount of in his show.

Man, do I hate Skinner. Well, I mean, not Skinner, I never met the guy. His work. Behaviorism. The whole rewards and punishment thing, the whole ‘changing other people’s behavior’ thing—and dog training seems to squarely sit in this continuum, whether one’s philosophy is on one end with ‘aversions’ or the other end with ‘positive rewards.’ It all strikes me as yucky and manipulative. Hey, I’m a radical unschooler. I don’t believe in rewards or punishments or trying to get people to behave in a certain way, or trying to get them to be motivated to work towards my goals for them. I’m all about people having their own goals. I don’t punish or reward my kids. I don’t even think these methods work, in the long run, if by ‘work’ one means ‘gets people to do what you want them to do,’ which I don’t want to do in the first place, but if I did, I think punishments and rewards suck as a method. I know I’m in the minority here, you don’t have to tell me.

One book that sums up well some of what I’m talking about is Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. Basically, if you get a person (or dog?) to do what you want for the reasons you put forth (they will get this reward or punishment if they do or don’t) you might get some short-term compliance (along with some secret fudging) but the person’s reason for doing/not doing the action isn’t coming from themselves, and so it won’t stick. You haven’t made a child honest by punishing them for lying, even if they stop lying (when they fear getting caught/punished). If you value honesty, you can model honesty, you can be scrupulously honest to your kid, but that’s it. If honesty truly has value, your kid will be able to perceive that, and will choose it for themselves.

So far, this kind of philosophy has worked fantastically in our family.

But if we got a dog?

Because, of course, I’ve jumped species, haven’t I. All of those thoughts above, and Kohn’s book, these are all about humans, not dogs, and maybe there is a difference…? I’ve only had one dog, Kodiak, and he was wonderful and required no training, so I really know nothing about this. If I got a dog now, totally hypothetically speaking, say a super cute puppy, I’d have to do some training, probably, I mean, that’s pretty standard. I think. Right? So, would I have to pick something on this scale of punishments or rewards?

I know, I know, people say things like “dogs need _________” and you can fill in the blank with things like ‘discipline, guidance, rules,’ etc. But people say that stuff all the time about kids and honestly, I think it’s not only a load of malarky, I think its age-ist, and rude. Here’s the test: if you take any “Group A needs _____” statement, such as, “Children need boundaries” (that’s a popular one) and change the noun to “women,” or “African-Americans” you can probably here the sexism, or the racism, right? If I got up in this day and age and said “African Americans need boundaries” I would get lynched. If I stood up and said, “Women need boundaries” not only would they take my Feminist Card, they would be right to do so. You just can’t lump everyone into one pile and then tell them what they need. Some children need some boundaries some of the time. That’s probably true, but it also means essentially nothing.

Again, I know I’m in the super-minority here. Just about everyone seems to have no problem talking about what kids need. So, forget I said all that. Nothing to see here, no radical philosophy showing, no alarmingly confrontational statements have been made. Move along, move along.

Because here’s the question I’m really wondering about: is it dogist to make statements about what dogs need? Aside from food and air, I mean. All the dog training (and maybe the problem is in the word training?) info I’ve run across in the last coupld of days is totally comfortable loading up with the Dogs Need X, Y, Z statements, whether it is ‘positive reinforcement’ or ‘rules and a pack leader’. And maybe they’re right? I honestly don’t know. Are dogs people, too?

Is there no unschooling for dogs? Respecting their needs? Helping them get what they want? Finding a way to say yes, or yes-if, a lot and no hardly at all? Choosing friendly partnership over an adversarial relationship? I just don’t know if I could go all behaviorist on another sentient creature.

I have no problem handling the goats. Would it be the same? I never ‘trained’ the goats, but they hop up on the milking stand and come when I call them and just generally are friendly and calm. They don’t come in my house though. Might be a totally different thing. They have their space, I have mine. And I definitely control their behavior, for example, by having a strong fence, or have goals for them, for example, by breeding them so that the produce milk. So maybe it isn’t the same thing at all, with animals.

Hmmm.

Well, obviously it’s all moot because we aren’t getting a dog.

You know what I’m talking about, that thumping bass line with the chords and/or melody on top?  Sounds like the guitar is more than one instrument?  I love that stuff.  But what in the world is a little white girl like me doing playing the blues?  What in the world could I possibly have the blues about?  I’ll tell ya.  I don’t.  You know, except for the general existential angst, artistic ambitions thwarted by the man, ecological disaster on the horizon, money toubles blues.  There’s those.  But in a personal, daily-life-satisfaction kind of way, naw.  I’m doing just fine.

Still. Although I feel like an impostor playing this music, I find I love it.  There is a lot of fingerstyle that I love, and there is a lot that is just too damn sweet.  And this music is not that, not sweet, not at all.

Learning to get my thumb to do something totally different from my fingers is cool, too—I can feel the neural connections being hooked up for this new activity.  As if these little dudes in construction hats are in there rewiring the circuitry, “Oh, now what does she want, a walking bass line, a boogie vamp, and a melody lick?  At the same time?  For heaven’s sake, we aren’t miracle workers here!”

Look at this guy, Lightning Hopkins, he just blows me away.  I mean look at his face, the gorgeous ruin of it, that’s the blues right there. Damn.

I’m just a poor, little white girl…trying to play the blues….just a poor, stubborn-headed, white girl…may I never get the really, real blues, please gawd, never, not really, no thank you….

Dora is a multi-gazillion dollar franchise with tv, book, toy, game, happy meal, etc., tie-ins and a musical component that is the aural equivalent of ebola.  I’m serious.  The songs on her show have to be the most annoying music in the history of the musical world times ten.

For example, the little purple thing on her back there is her back-pack. It gets it’s own song.  I can’t even say the word ‘back-pack’ without the stupid ass back-pack song, a tune that infects my brain for days after the briefest exposure, getting stuck in my head. “Back pack, back pack…”  It turns into so many things.  “Bad cat, bad cat…” “Jump back, jump back…”, “Fuck that, fuck that…” You get the picture.

Paul is particularly susceptible to this infection, using his own made up lyrics, of course, and at a moment’s exposure will have the back-pack tune in his brain for weeks.  It’s gotten to the point where he starts singing it, maybe he’s making breakfast, or tying his shoes, or just walking around the yard, some phrase, or half-phrase even, triggers the song in his head and he starts singing it, and one of the kids goes over and socks him.  No talking, no explanations, just wham!   The poor man can’t stop himself, I know, but I can’t help but feel their pain.  The song is a nightmare.

It isn’t like we watch the show.  The infection can come in on a commercial—of which there are many—while we innocently watch something else.  What to do? What to do?  My family is turning into a mass of barely contained violence and musical torture.

I knew we had reached critical mass the other day in the grocery store, walking along, looking for apple juice, when we passed a box of Dora cereal and Sophie stood there, finger pointing in total accusation, and said, “DORA, I CURSE YOU.”

I’m not kidding there, she really said that!

Why are these songs so catchy, when they are so bad?  Who writes them and what drugs are they on?  What is their end-game?  Or maybe I don’t want to know.

We’re getting help.  I’m calling in an exorcist.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

After a while of running ahead and doubling back, Sophie started a game of touching her tongue to the tip of various leaves, to catch the rainwater that pools there, just before it falls.  Half-kidding, I asked her if the taste changed on different trees.

“Oh, yes,” she said, immediately.  “Oak trees are strong.  Spice bushes are minty.  Don’t do beech, they’re fuzzy.”

Wow.  “Do you have a favorite?”

She thought about it.  “Sycamore.  They taste clean.”

The varying  taste of rainwater drunk from assorted leaf cups seems like profound information to have at your fingertips.

A minute later I saw her making a face and scrubbing at her tongue with her palm.  “Bad tasting tree?” I asked.

“No.”  She spat.  “Spiderweb.”

I’m glad she has the time to gather this knowledge!

What is wrong with me?  Like I need another animal to take care of!  Or another expense in this time of the Ridiculously High Dental Bills, don’t even ask, it’s a nightmare.  But this dog thing, this is nuts.

Still, I keep thinking of a puppy….

I’ve also been thinking of camping at a nearby music festival in the fall—which is SO UNLIKE ME, because I usually hate those things.  Or rather, I get totally overwhelmed in crowds and noise and just want to be home and in the quiet, so what the heck would make me think, oh yeah, camp with the kids in a party of thousands plus four music stages with non-stop NOISE, that sounds like fun.  Wha??

Maybe I’m possessed.

Or maybe it’s a New Chapter, you know that feeling?  Sometimes you know it’s happening because of a clear marker i.e. you finish some training program, you move to a new city, you have a baby.  But looking back I can see other times when I haven’t noticed a new chapter starting until after the fact.  In hindsight I can see, oh yeah, things really shifted when [fill in the blank]. After that, I was a different person.  Sometimes it sneaks up on you.

I went to visit my grandmother not long ago and had this strange experience looking into her bedroom mirror, the same Grandma’s Bedroom Mirror I have looked into my whole life.  I hadn’t been to see her at her house in a few years and seeing myself in that mirror this time—I looked totally different to myself.  Not physically.  Everything else.  It was weird, as if I was looking back on all those other times and that girl was someone else.

I bet everyone has a few moments like that in their lives, when you become acutely aware that your life is moving along, you’re not who you used to be, things have changed.

I am turning 40 in a few months, so maybe it’s a mid-life thing.  Not a ‘recapture your youth’ mid-life thing, because I really feel okay about getting older. Rather  a ‘turning a corner’ mid-life thing.  It’s interesting.

But a dog, that’s just silly, right?  And not only that, I seem to be attracted to these gigantic dogs, a fluffy white Great Pyrenees, what the hell am I thinking?  Well, I can’t afford a shrink, maybe a puppy is just the mood-lifter I’m needing to move into the next piece of whatevertheheck this life thing is that I’m doing, that we’re all doing.

(No, Maya, just step away from the computer and stop googling pictures of puppies.  Right now.  Step away.)

I always doubt having goats on this day.

Oh. Crap.

But then it dawned on me!  I really did just finish a huge creative project this week.  And despite that, I have been trying to launch right into another one, with no break.  It isn’t the my current novel completely sucks, it’s that the muse is tired.

I suppose my confusion is understandable because I’ve been working on the novel all through the podcast production (albeit lightly) so it seems reasonable I would simply continue to do so.  And the podcast production was not ‘writing a novel’—although I did edit it more as I went, but still, not the same as creating the novel from beginning to end, I don’t think, anyway, so why should I be tired?  And also I’ve never worked on two big projects at the same time before, so I guess I thought I would just keep on with the novel, amping it up even, now that I was done with the podcast. And why not, right?  What’s to stop me?

The muse, that’s who.  If I won’t take a break, she’ll trash my book out of just wanting to be free to not work on it anymore.

So, um, in the interest of not having my muse throw a big dramatic scene and QUIT ON ME, I think I’ll, um, take a few days off.  Maybe more.  Total permission not to have to work on anything.  Watch some movies, play guitar, hang with the kiddos, no getting up early, no planning and plotting and problem solving, just for a bit.  To keep her happy.  And we all know, what a writer needs most, beside a six-figure contract, is a happy muse.

It is true that I always take a break after finishing a novel.  I know that about writing, that I need time to rest in between projects.  I just didn’t know that putting out an audio book would fall in the same category.  Maybe it’s a more creative act that I have been thinking.  There are certainly many creative decisions to be made throughout the process, plus performance, that’s creative.  Making an audio book is not just reading out loud that’s for sure.

So, anyway, duh.  I need to regroup before I can jump back in.  Which is annoying because I really want this novel to be done.  But trying to force it has been backfiring on my ass all week.  Sigh.  But the good news is, and I love it when there is good news: I don’t need to trash the whole novel! I just need a break from it.

I’m a bit of a task-master, I guess.  Time to lighten up.  So.  Taking the weekend off.  Three days off.  Doing no writing related work.  Nothing.

I can do this.

The LAST PODCAST.

(It’s not up for y’all yet, I’ll post it today—no, I’m not going to make you wait for Friday—and it might show up tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how quickly podiobooks updates.)

The end of a big project is always a surprise.  I can’t believe I did it, honestly.  The newness of the idea—how about podcasting one of my novels?—still feels pretty new.  I bought the mic in mid-March, so that’s five months ago—five months!—but it has gone by in a blur.  And now it’s done.  Complete.  Podcast a novel: check.  This is so weird.  The time between idea conception and completion just…collapsed.

Anyway, I really hope y’all like the big finale.  It’s a bit long, 45 minutes, but it didn’t seem right to cut the last arc into pieces.  Look for it tomorrow!  If you’ve been listening all along and like what you’ve heard, consider leaving a review over at podiobooks.  I know I’m encouraged to try things when lots of other folks have reviewed it and and said it’s worth my time.

I have had such a good time with this whole project.  Podcasting a novel turns out to have been a very postivite experience, not in small part because of all you great listeners who have been cheering me on.

So, with that giant creative project in the can, I now give my full attention back to my current novel revision.  Will this novel ever be finished?  I started it a little over a year ago.  I don’t even have a title for it yet….