In 2007 I went to Kripalu for the first time, for a week-long class in "Building Your Yoga Practice". They handed out Moleskine notebooks at the first meeting, and through the week I wrote my thoughts as they arose. I've made occasional additions since, the last in January 2020. Rereading the material in 2024, the Voice of the writing is very clearly ME. Some extracts:
I seek to quiet myself enough to observe, to sharpen awareness ... WITNESS ... It's not that I want to DO anything, so much as to practise the subtle art of observing, and of watching the watcher.In answer to the question "Who am I?" here's what I wrote:
I am what I think: the words that go through my mind, the flitting thoughts ... I am a word processor.(and I kept on writing, just capturing the flow as the Voice produced it, in the how-can-I-know-what-I-think-until-I-see-what-I-say mode, some of which I see differently 17 years later..)
...A bundle of comfortable habits and satisfactions, an appreciator of wit in various media, a rehearser of words and phrases in the mind, a beginner at many things. An improviser, a sidestepper of challenges, and an evader of confrontation. A collector, often on impulse (I'll never see that again, so...). A possessor of things, and of relationships. Unexperienced with sorrow, or suffering, or pain, or service to others. A careful occupier of a safe and well-padded niche in the world, rarely a risk-taker, adventurous mentally but not physically. Mildly entangled in legacy. Curious, within a certain compass, but not questing. Not particularly attuned to body or to others' needs and emanations. Self-ish rather than other-ish. Prideful, but still in search of others' approval and praise. Not generally ambitious. I don't particularly feel that I'm actually the Mind inside a Body, still less that I'm a Soul wrapped in a Mind. The "I" is a 4-dimensional creature, closely tied to the temporal dimension. Perhaps there are more dimensions than the 4 of spacetime, but I don't sense them or imagine what they might be. The "I" processes energies of various sorts and qualities, and in that sense is Vital... I and everyone else am/are caught in webs of contingency, with a very large component of randomness. Shit Happens.So I seem to be a catalog of states and stances, most of them not very malleable, and a lot of them pretty unexamined. That doesn't bother me, and I'm not aware of being afraid of anything.
In answer to a friend's query about the experience, I wrote a rumination that still sounds ...authentic: a yoga practice that belongs to you?