The Beauty of Fluency

Inner Landscape #5, 2008

In order to develop fluency in any aspect of our lives, we need to discover what feeds and sustains us and what doesn’t. Becoming more adept at this process is at the heart of any yoga practice. Through yoga, we develop our bodily fluency, our energetic intelligence, so that we retain the essential and release the extraneous. What serves us is retained so that it nourishes us. What doesn’t serve us is shed, released.

Through yoga, we become better acquainted with what resides at our core. From asana to breathwork and meditation, yoga offers us deep insights into our strengths and weaknesses, our abilities and our challenges. The better we know the topography of our bodies, hearts, and minds, the more we know where to place new information and ideas, where to dig, establish, and build. We can host new experiences in an optimal way, and develop fluency, a certain ease and clarity in regard to ourselves. We transform the world around us as we are transformed by it.

 Paul Cézanne - Still Life with Apples c.1890

When something speaks to our sensibilities, it embeds itself within us on an emotional, psychological, or physical level. It makes us its home. Most likely it is a magnetic draw of like to like. Think of how two adjacent drops of water seem to magnetize toward each other. Now think of that apple from a Cézanne still life whose roughly sensual smudges of orange-red-brown-yellow-green make you want to merge with the painting itself…or the way that the translucent fabric of a woman’s collar in a Vermeer painting makes you hold your breath for just a moment, and in that moment the image takes up residence within you…or that sudden turn of a dancer that echoes and reverberates inside your body. Where there is affinity, the boundaries blur, open, and embrace.

 Johannes Vermeer - The Lacemaker c. 1669-1670

Walt Whitman says:

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

As an artist, Whitman is a medium. He transforms and is transformed by. He is fluent. Let our bodies be a host for our experiences, allowing the best ones to embed themselves and the rest to pass through us. Then watch as we become more complex, richer for our having invited them.

Yoga is the means by which we connect, process, and transform what exists within us. As we step onto our mats, we bring with us that mix of things that is a collection of every experience we have had that day: frustrating, joyful, confusing, interesting, sad, sweet, hilarious, and indifferent. Yoga offers us the space, time, and techniques with which to process that amalgamation of experiences, and to develop fluency, lucidity, and artistry.

So try this:

Inhale. Take in every bit of information that you have received through your senses from the minute you awoke this morning - the cool tile of your bathroom floor under your feet, the fragment of a song heard through a car window, the smell of a perfect espresso or of a grimy subway stairwell, the churning crowd of bodies on your way to work, the chiseled architecture of a particular building against its blue or gray backdrop of sky…  Draw these things in a steady stream toward your center.

Pause. What resides at your core? Every experience you’ve ever had is somehow lodged there or has passed through. Assimilate the new information. Soften. Let the experiences settle and merge.

Exhale. Release what doesn’t serve you. The breath draws in experience so that the external becomes internal and the internal is transformed. What you exhale is the residue. What remains is the essential. In this way, you become more adept, more fluent at understanding your own motivations, abilities, values, and goals. You become more fluent in the art of your own life.

The Beauty of the Yoga

Double Bakasana with Lotus, 2007

I was talking with a friend over a post-yoga Saturday brunch about being frequently asked to explain why yoga can be a spiritual and not merely a physical practice. As someone who has been teaching yoga for eight years, I am regularly presented with this question from a wide range of friends and acquaintances: students, family members, childhood friends, and particularly from people who know me from the art world, in which, somewhat ironically, there is a frequent sense of suspicion surrounding my choice to dive so deeply into a spiritual discipline, as if it threw into question my commitment to my other spiritual discipline, namely art making.

So when someone does have the curiosity to ask (and I welcome the question), “How can a series of movements and alignment instructions be a spiritual practice?” My briefest, most lucid response to an extremely complex question is generally something like this:

If we consider the body, heart, and mind as a triangular relationship, when one of the three falls out of balance, the triangle is thrown off, distorted. We need to tend to all three points, as each serves as a gateway into the other two. We weave back and forth through the gateways like a circuitry: body – mind – heart. And what happens in each area functions on both a literal and metaphorical level within the others. If I am mentally irritated or emotionally joyful or physically energetic, that visibly manifests in the other areas. It can be seen and felt. Once we get a handle on this dynamic, we can step into this circuitry and play with it, shift it, use one of the gateways to draw the others back into balance. In this way, we begin to participate more fully in our own embodied experience.

It is this constant dance between these three entryways that leads us into a deeper more meaningful experience of ourselves. If we look at the Tantric model, body, heart, and mind not only triangulate, but fractalize. So every single point is a point of departure in every direction for more–expanding exponentially outward like shooting stars. 

Bodyheartmindheartbodymindheartmindbodymindheartbodyheart…And so on, and so on...

 Repainting a Shri Chakra, Meenakshi Temple, Madurai

Can yoga be a spiritual practice? Yes. Can art making be a spiritual practice? Yes. Can running or dancing or singing? Yes-yes-yes. Of course, you can strip away the spiritual component of any of these practices and leave them as simple calisthenics – whether physical or mental. Any can be reduced to a simple technical enterprise. But then you’re not doing the yoga any more, or really fully participating in anything in a rich and meaningful way.

 Double Bakasana Double Lotus, 2007

The word yoga literally means union. The Sanskrit root of yoga is yuj, meaning to yoke, to connect, to unite. When we do the yoga, we are uniting body, heart, and mind. Every asana, every breath, every gesture and movement becomes a deeper assertion of the exquisite circuitry of our very selves.

The Beauty of the Space Between II - Sun Salutations

Inner Landscape 6

The moment when one pose transforms into another.

The moment when materials merge with intention to become art.

The place of unknowing, possibility, and potential hovering between a thing and a thing – an idea and an idea – a place and another place.

The space between each yoga pose is a place of ambiguity, an acknowledgement of dissolution – the anything-can-happen moment of transformation. If you take a basic Surya Namaskar or Sun Salute (standing-standing forward bend- plank-catturanga-up dog-down dog-and so on), the rhythm is pose-pose-pose-pose. But what happens in the shift between the poses is the dissolving of one form and the assertion of another.  Utter chaos in the sense that anything could and does happen in that space between the poses:

You inhale or exhale. This inflates or relaxes your body. You wonder what you might eat later. You have the shiver of a recollection of something someone said to you earlier that you need to remember or that chafed a bit or flattered you. You experience pleasure. You experience discomfort. You feel ecstatic and think yes! endorphins! You feel sluggish and wonder if the pose will always feel like this from now on. You think – what if I don’t ever love this pose? You ever-so-slightly adjust the direction of your front foot. Suddenly you feel like everything in your hips is off kilter. You squeeze the feet toward each other, toning the muscles of your legs and feel a burst of energy rise up through your body. You wonder if you need to wash your mat. Why is the person next to you breathing so loudly? That’s ok, actually, you tell yourself. Or maybe it’s not. This has been 10 seconds of your practice.

The Space Between is a universe of possibility - a mental and sensory primordial muck that you can dive into headfirst or dread. Your choice. You can flounder endlessly or you can pull together and sculpt the space with your intention. You can be overwhelmed or you can feel liberated by the momentary lack of boundaries. You can plunge feet first into your choices instead of passively waiting for them to emerge.

Rilke says, “everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”

Contemplate-plunge in-draw out.

In the studio 2010

I was sitting alone in my studio looking at the hundreds of pencils and colored pencils grouped generally by color into a number of jars. I looked at the sheets of deliciously thick smooth drawing paper and realized that I was in the goo, the muck. Not in a bad way. Just an acknowledgement of what was. And this was ok. I knew that a whole bunch of physical, mental, and, yes – spiritual movements had to take place before the pencils and the paper did their thing by means of my eyes, hands, and mind.

You can’t force inspiration but you can’t sit around and wait for it either. Engage. Do the yoga of art. Dive into the muck instead of simply stopping at the contemplation of it. Begin doing, accepting that sometimes the engagement calls forth your creativity and sometimes it doesn’t…it might be a crescendo or it might be a whimper. You can make a bad drawing or have a bad practice, and it is a necessary part of the rise and fall of any creative endeavor.

In the studio, 2010

Sitting and writing tonight, ideas and images poured out my head through my fingers onto the keyboard and took their sprawling form on the computer screen. A rich mess of four pages filled with fragments, ellipses, quotes, ideas, and references had emerged when I finally stopped typing. I closed my computer and went to brush my teeth. Then I stopped, reopened my computer, and wrote this paragraph. In the space between my one action and my next, something gelled, codified. Tomorrow I re-attack the raw material, cutting and pasting until a coherent whole emerges. I move. I draw. I write. We use our bodies and minds to inscribe our worlds – to create and delineate our embodied experience.

I am guest blogger and "Spirit Guide" at SocialWorkout.com   -   April 15-May 15, 2010 

for their Million Minute Month challenge - posting every Tuesday - please take a peek!

http://www.socialworkout.com/2010/04/20/sun-salutations-and-beauty-space-between

The Beauty of Unexpected Juxtapositions II - Water Fai, Pikachu Moon Mama, Organic Greens, & Yoga in Spencer Tunick’s Barn

Photo by Austen Mikulka

Question:

What do you get when an organic farming advocate and an artist famous for photographing thousands of nude bodies in public host a weekend performance of a Japanese psychedelic rock band in the artist’s upstate barn, bracketed by an elaborate farmers market meal and a morning yoga class?

Answer:

At the top of the barn stairs, we shed layers of rain-soaked clothing and dripping boots to settle into the warmth of a room carpeted with enormous pillows. Full from an amazing meal of organic food bought at the Union Square greenmarket and driven, like the rest of us, upstate through the thunderstorm to Spencer Tunick’s barn, we waited for the music to begin. In the group of about 40 people – artists, writers, yogis, musicians, designers, parents, kids - there were unexpected connections linking the New York art world to the Osaka music scene and the international Anusara Yoga community, people who hadn’t seen each other in years or who knew of each other but who had never actually met. The connections went deeper than the differences, as they often do, offering unanticipated creative links and affinities.

Photo by Austen Mikulka

And then...Bubble letters spelling out WATER FAI and PIKACHU MOON MAMA covering the photo paper roll serving as a backdrop. Pikachu Moon Mama exploding with energy, penetrating voice and grinding guitar. Discarding her guitar, feedback streaming from the amplifier, Pikachu methodically removing her clothing, fixing all of us with her gaze while crawling through the pillows, drawing on her body with a vibrant red lipstick, inviting others to do the same. Returning to the mike, pulling the energy back to a focused center, slipping her dress back on, settling back down into the pillows. Then Water Fai first sitting then standing on the floor, guitars-drums-keyboards, waves of notes and rhythms moving toward each other, slowly building an ocean of sound. A watery immersive energy in contrast to Pikachu’s fiery and coy persona. The intensity of the rain, the lightening, the humidity, the wet warmth concentrated in musical form.

photo by Austen Mikulka

Morning in the kitchen. Over a bagel I ask our hosts Kristen and Spencer what kind of a story they want me to tell for the yoga class. Spencer says – one in which the women always desire the men – and then we all start laughing. Back in the barn, cushions stacked, mats out, I tell the room about the Gopis’ love for Krishna…they follow him into the forest, seduced by his song…they fall into meditation, and awake, missing him, jealous of each other, angry, they move through all of the rasas, the flavors or tones of experience, until he reappears, saying to them – You are never without me. I am never without you. I am your very nature. And your very nature is desire…

The weekend ends for most of us with a glimpse over Spencer’s shoulder as he photographs some of the musicians posing nude in his kitchen. Bags and equipment packed up, we disperse into trains, buses, and cars: Pikachu Moon Mama and Water Fai off to Providence for a performance, the rest of us back to NYC. We pass miles of sheared-off branches and uprooted trees resting heavily in deep side-of-the-road puddles left by the storm.  We sit in traffic in the quiet comfortable hum of the car, enjoying each other’s company.

photo by Austen Mikulka

Water Fai – http://waterfai.com
Pikachu Moon Mama - http://www.myspace.com/moonmama2013

Spencer Tunick – www.spencertunick.com

Daniel Bowman Simon – www.TheWhoFarm.org

The Gothamist's write-up of the event:
http://gothamist.com/2010/03/16/video_spencer_tunick.php

Master of Ceremonies Spencer Tunick

The Beauty of The Space Between - Visiting the Art Fairs

Mona Hatoum - Worry Beads

The work that seemed to me to be able to hold its own in the cluttered environment of the Art Fairs this weekend in NYC were pieces that had, at their center, an open-endedness or spaciousness – not a lack, but a loaded emptiness – a meaningful sense of space. There was the giant loop of Mona Hatoum’s Worry Beads, implying without illustrating a human presence, series of gestures, and sense of ritual.  

Jonathan Schipper - To Dust

There was the space between the two upside-down dangling figures in Jonathan Schipper's To Dust, which, as they gently swayed, grated bits of cement off of each other’s surfaces - a reflection on relationships and perhaps time. There was also the cobweb of glass and gourds spilling from the snout of Rina Banerjee’s taxadermied gazelle head, stretching toward a knickknack globe on a little stand. The disparate objects were joined together to shape an implied set of symbolisms some of which related to colonialism and conquest, but the totality of which evaded any one specific interpretation. The meaning happened between the objects in the space that the viewer could construct – leaping visually and associatively from object to object and forming connections. In each of these pieces what wasn’t said or done was as significant as what was.

Rina Banerjee

Heather Cantrell representing Kinkead Contemporary at the Volta show created a scenario that viewers were literally invited to step into. The piece was comprised of a painted Rousseau-like jungle environment - an cluttered green floor filled with a couple of stumps, plants, backdrops, and strategically placed mirrors. You could pose to have a black and white Polaroid taken in the jungle surroundings with the artist reflected in the photo as well. There were a number of props and masks available for use. This was a creative psychological space between the artist and participant in which a variety of scenarios could happen image-wise. Then of course there was the space between what the participant thought was happening and the illusion shaped by the artist and captured by the camera. This series of variables resulted in a number of wildly different photos, each one fascinating in its own way, as the space between the artist and the participants was continually renegotiated.

A Study in Portraiture (Susanna) - by Heather Cantrell

It takes courage to leave space – it’s risky. Silence or emptiness can be boring or uncomfortable, signifying that we don’t have anything to say or draw or to express. One has to be very confident in the power of one’s words and images in order to be silent and let space speak. It requires giving up some degree of control and flirting with possible failure.

Much like the importance of leaving visual and conceptual space in an artwork, one of the things I’ve learned about teaching a powerful yoga class is knowing when the silence can be as significant as the words. Newer teachers sometimes feel the urge to clutter up the space with too much language – a barrage of verbal instructions and explanations. You have to sculpt the space, making your words strong enough so that the silence offers a counterpoint, a pushing back at the sound. This is like the positive and negative space for me in a drawing.

Doris Salcedo

Certain highly skilled artists use the denial of space as a strategy. The artist Doris Salcedo packs the negative space of ordinary pieces of furniture with cement, creating a glacially solid unyielding non-space. Where there should be space there is none. And it reads as terrifying, suffocating. The lack of space between things is painful in these pieces because it does not allow for possibility, growth, or change. It is denying of life.

In the yogic practice of pranayama, or breathing exercises, we talk about the pause between the breaths. That moment when an inhale shifts to an exhale or the exhale to an inhale. It is a space of change, possibility, and transformation. We expand to release and release to expand. This pause is a place, a room, a world that we can inhabit and in which we can meditate. That moment of suspension between the breaths is a place of unlimited potential. It is an oasis, an opening that is always there waiting for us to return.

I do not know which to prefer

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

From Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

The Beauty of the Unexpected

Karma and Lila and unexpected beauty

Karma –action, cause and effect, the idea that an action taken sets into motion a series of other actions, occurrences, or events

Lila – chance, unexpected beauty, play, that which cannot be planned, but only hoped for

Charles Ray - Untitled 2009

Charles Ray at the Whitney Biennial 1993 & 2010

I was speaking with my friend Jesse who had just gone to the opening of the Whitney Biennial on Wednesday. He said that it was the Charles Ray show – The artist who parked a sculpture of a fire truck outside of the Whitney for the duration of the 1993 Biennial, and frequent creator of shocking pieces. This time Charles Ray was represented by a room of tall gorgeous flower paintings that he previously made only for family and friends and didn’t generally exhibit. There was the surprise and delight of the flowers, and then the surprise and delight of the fact that they were made by a guy also known for a piece called Family Romance – a nude nuclear family, each member shrunk or expanded so that the children and parents were the same height – the nudity of all four holding hands gratingly uncomfortable to look at. But these flower paintings were…pretty…really outrageously pretty.

Charles Ray - Family Romance 1993

William Kentridge at the MoMA  2010

We shifted to a discussion of MoMA’s exhibition of the South African artist William Kentridge, who makes scratchy black and white drawings into animations of helplessness and alienation. I mentioned one particular moment in which a middle-aged man in a business suit looks down, watching as water rises up to engulf his pants legs. For whatever reason this image always makes me want to cry. My friend Jesse immediately responded – me too!  But how? The first time I saw it I felt that way and every time I’ve seen it since I have had the same reaction. 

Obviously Kentridge did the work, planned it carefully, applied his sensibility to it with care, but what is it about that moment that elicited such a specific reaction in both of us? That degree of emotional connection with an artwork goes beyond Karma, because you can plan forever to make an emotional piece and fall completely flat. Actually that is usually what happens if you begin with such an intention. But because the structure is there, the Karmic thing, the Lila might and in this case DID happen.

William Kentridge -from Stereoscope 1998-99

Bill T. Jones (Lois Greenfield photo)

Bill T. Jones – Still/Here at Brooklyn Academy of Music 1994

A couple of days later I was thinking about the introduction Bill T Jones gave at the premiere of his Still/Here, a groundbreaking piece addressing the crisis and loss of the AIDS epidemic. It was a while ago, but this is how I remember it: the ever-elegant BTJ walked up on stage in his tux to introduce the piece. He then brought up his mother, who was tiny in relation to his towering height and wide shoulders.  She was dressed very simply with a flowered dress and hat. Without musical accompaniment, she began to sing a gospel song. Her voice cracked a bit on the higher notes. BTJ began to make subtle rippling movements with his body while standing in place by his mother’s side, reacting to the rise and fall of her voice. She finished the song. The two took a bow, walked off stage, and STILL/HERE began.  I honestly could have walked out before the rest of the performance ever happened. I was already saturated with the intense beauty of the experience. It was elegant and raw, sentimental and disorienting. It drew together an unimagined combination of associations to move me in a weirdly specific way I hadn’t been moved before or since. It felt profoundly authentic.

Karma and Lila and art making

The play of Karma and Lila is a concept essential to art making. Lila isn’t just sweetness or happiness – it is the magic, the unexpected beauty popping up like a late winter crocus through the snow – or a 6½ foot man in a tux making snakily beautiful movement next to his elderly mother singing a church hymn onstage. Or the surprise of a famously shocking artist making pretty flower pictures for his family. Or the resignation of a crudely drawn animated figure watching but doing nothing as smudges of blue water slowly rise up past his knees. And beauty can be pretty or beauty can be gut-wrenching.

But you DO have to do the Karma – you have to have structure and discipline in your art making practice in order for anything to happen. No action = no result. But the idea is that you cannot anticipate a very particular action or a specific outcome. It trips you up and cuts off creativity. Part of what makes great art great is the magic of ‘how did they do that?’  And very few artists can entirely explain how a particular work came into being. We can talk, on one hand, about the materials and techniques used, and on the other hand about the ideas that inspire us - what we were experimenting with or pursuing philosophically. All that is the Karma. But there is a gap. On one side lives the day-to-day business of the matter and means. And on the other side lives the eventual outcome. In the gap is where Lila resides.

So I remind myself within my creative life to:

1. Be authentic to my personal vision and creativity

2. Do the Karma, the work, the action.

3. Embrace the unexpected and the unlikely.

3. Invite Lila without expectation. Stay open to possibility.

“When you’re hoping with expectation that’s Karma.

 Hope without specific expectation is Lila.” - Douglas Brooks

The Beauty of Practice

 “We practice for the practice” Douglas Brooks

The reason why some of us become artists is a persistent and overwhelming urge to create…something.  Something written, drawn, performed - whatever medium best connects with the impulse. The creative urge is generally wrapped up in the act of creating rather than in the result, but once the process begins to take form, the purity of the initial impulse is altered by public opinion, day-to-day practicalities, and the external life it takes on outside of ourselves.

So how can art making be a practice and not just a process moving toward a particular result? It is amazing how attached I am to work when I am in the act of making it. But once I am done, my fascination softens to a fondness or interest in what I have created - hardly the compulsion that propelled its creation forward. While I am working on something, it is like a love affair. I think about it all day, before I go to sleep; I dream about it. It alternately torments me and thrills me and creates a profound immersive feeling like a delicious meal that I am in the midst of savoring.

Most of my artist friends and I regularly joke around about our ongoing swing between – “I am so brilliant” and “I’m an idiot, a fraud – I have nothing to say.” It’s just part of the creative package and is determined by where we are in the process at the moment. But if we can see the act of art making as a practice rather than as a set of results (all economic concerns and the art market aside…), then the paradigm shifts. We are in the process and the process is in us. Actually there is no separation between the process and ourselves. We succeed because of the simple fact that we have engaged and are engaged.

This is what yoga has taught me on the most transformative and essential level. If you are IN it, you are doing it. The goal is often the process and if you can live fully in the process, mindful of where you came from and open to where you are going, then you have accessed the delight of simultaneity and are living in the heart of your creativity. This is not a rejection of aspirations and goals, but rather an embrace of the richness of all aspects of the creative experience.  It is a bigger picture than the linear pursuit of a solitary goal. In holding together the origin of an idea, its present incarnation, and its future prospects, the process becomes the past, present, and future woven together in a vibratory hum of creativity and possibility.

 Henri Matisse - The Red Studio 1911

In Matisse’s The Red Studio, the circle of numbers on the grandfather clock is visible, but no hands. Matisse’s work hangs on the walls, sits on the table and on sculpture stands, and rests on the floor. The materials and inspirations for art making are scattered throughout the room as well. There are unfinished canvases and empty frames. But time is indeterminate, suspended in a sensuous flood of red that seems to pour off the edges of the canvas. Past-present-future in a painting. A limitless self-portrait in which creativity envelops time.

In any creative pursuit we talk about being in the flow. In Anusara yoga we talk about stepping into the flow. We move toward the midline, our center, so that we can dive into the reservoir of our resources. We expand outward from there into the unknown. A pulsation between inner focus and outer expression. Process. Simultaneity. An intricate weave of then, is, and will be.