This weekend Grupo Capoeira Angola Palmares (New York) had training, a batizado, and a graduation. We had a mestre from Florianopolis in town as well as a contra-mestre and instructor from London, and students from Nashville, Baton Rouge, Denver, and Portland.
Technically, it's only a "baptism" for your first cord, and a "graduation" for the rest. So we trained all week long, and then on Saturday we held the baptism/graduation. Seven of us adults were earning our first cord, which was actually the second cord -dark green. Other people were graduating to dark green/dark yellow and other higher cords. A few students received their capoeira apelidos, and so now I have to get used to calling them by new names.
We learned a few new sequences, which included a few twists on moves I hadn't seen before. It was both inspiring and frustrating to be in a class with so many advanced students!
I also managed to string my berimbau for the first time. Then, later, I also managed to string it tight enough. Later that evening, my first arame snapped, so now I need to learn how to replace it.
My friends have departed for their homes, so it's nice not to have four people sleeping on my floor, but it's also sad that the training is over.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Getting from signifier to signified
It was a lesson I should have learned when my IT was giving me issues: The location of pain isn't necessarily the source of it.
And my first clue should have been my teachers telling me that I "ought" to be able to do things that I was finding impossible, like navasana or tucking up into handstand. I was strong enough, they said; it must be mind over matter.
No, the first clue was that my lower back starting hurting.
The second clue should have been that the recommended remedies, such as forward folds, didn't do anything for relief. Neither did "tucking my pelvis" to take the arch out of my back.
At least I picked up on one clue: My slouchy posture was indicative of … something.
It wasn't until I randomly did a side stretch one day and found it to be a near-miracle cure that I realized that my lower back wasn't actually the problem. Then there was "pull up in your chest," which did a lot more for my posture than any amount of tucking.
I still don't know their name. Is it my obliques? My intercostals? My lats? Does it matter? I just know that I'm retraining a set of muscles that have somehow gone to sleep on me.
They're improving. They still have a long way to go; I still can't tuck up into handstand. But the difference is amazing - even if the amount of muscle gained is small, knowing where to focus my efforts has improved my handstand notably. It's also helped with other things along the way. The other day, I managed to get into lotus while in tripod headstand. It wasn't elegant, but doing it without falling over should earn me a cookie anyway.
It's exciting to have a breakthrough like that, even though I think, "Why didn't I know this ages ago?" Also exciting: No back pain.
And my first clue should have been my teachers telling me that I "ought" to be able to do things that I was finding impossible, like navasana or tucking up into handstand. I was strong enough, they said; it must be mind over matter.
No, the first clue was that my lower back starting hurting.
The second clue should have been that the recommended remedies, such as forward folds, didn't do anything for relief. Neither did "tucking my pelvis" to take the arch out of my back.
At least I picked up on one clue: My slouchy posture was indicative of … something.
It wasn't until I randomly did a side stretch one day and found it to be a near-miracle cure that I realized that my lower back wasn't actually the problem. Then there was "pull up in your chest," which did a lot more for my posture than any amount of tucking.
I still don't know their name. Is it my obliques? My intercostals? My lats? Does it matter? I just know that I'm retraining a set of muscles that have somehow gone to sleep on me.
They're improving. They still have a long way to go; I still can't tuck up into handstand. But the difference is amazing - even if the amount of muscle gained is small, knowing where to focus my efforts has improved my handstand notably. It's also helped with other things along the way. The other day, I managed to get into lotus while in tripod headstand. It wasn't elegant, but doing it without falling over should earn me a cookie anyway.
It's exciting to have a breakthrough like that, even though I think, "Why didn't I know this ages ago?" Also exciting: No back pain.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Yoga in NYC: On Dharma Mittra, preliminary
It's only a month into my three-month trial, so I hesitate to draw any firm conclusions as to whether or not it's for me, but I can still tell you a little bit about the studio.
Dharma Mittra actually has two locations. The West location is newer and it's where Dharma himself teaches. However, it's almost all meditation and other mental classes; the physical classes are mostly over at the older East studio. The studio has a very comfortable feel. It's not modern or sleek; instead, it resembles someone's den, or a summer cabin that has never been interior decorated in the proper sense; things have simply accumulated over the years. (The place it's most like is Joao Grande's academy, but you likely haven't been there.)
The only thing I don't like about the space is that the practice area is carpeted. It's low-pile, but I've noticed it still affects my balance, as I'm used to hardwood.
The interpersonal dynamic at the studio is a little different. Most places, students chat before class (or at least an "in" clique does). Here, they actively encourage silence. The teachers don't even make a particular effort to introduce themselves to new students before class or ask about injuries. This doesn't prevent a community from forming, as Dharma's students seem to be very loyal. In only my second class, I recognized several folks from my first.
And one interesting thing about the students - when is the last time you went to a yoga class, particularly an advanced one, and didn't see any tattoos? It took me most of my first class to put my finger on what felt so strange, but there it was. This is not a hipster haven. What you will find is a lot of men - nearly half the students in many classes - which is an anomaly.
I haven't had the chance yet to take class with Dharma Mittra; the three-month membership includes three classes at Dharma West, which I definitely plan to take advantage of. And to file under "useless trivia" - he is Brazilian, making this the second of the three studios I've tried that have Brazilian owners.
Dharma Mittra actually has two locations. The West location is newer and it's where Dharma himself teaches. However, it's almost all meditation and other mental classes; the physical classes are mostly over at the older East studio. The studio has a very comfortable feel. It's not modern or sleek; instead, it resembles someone's den, or a summer cabin that has never been interior decorated in the proper sense; things have simply accumulated over the years. (The place it's most like is Joao Grande's academy, but you likely haven't been there.)
The only thing I don't like about the space is that the practice area is carpeted. It's low-pile, but I've noticed it still affects my balance, as I'm used to hardwood.
The interpersonal dynamic at the studio is a little different. Most places, students chat before class (or at least an "in" clique does). Here, they actively encourage silence. The teachers don't even make a particular effort to introduce themselves to new students before class or ask about injuries. This doesn't prevent a community from forming, as Dharma's students seem to be very loyal. In only my second class, I recognized several folks from my first.
And one interesting thing about the students - when is the last time you went to a yoga class, particularly an advanced one, and didn't see any tattoos? It took me most of my first class to put my finger on what felt so strange, but there it was. This is not a hipster haven. What you will find is a lot of men - nearly half the students in many classes - which is an anomaly.
I haven't had the chance yet to take class with Dharma Mittra; the three-month membership includes three classes at Dharma West, which I definitely plan to take advantage of. And to file under "useless trivia" - he is Brazilian, making this the second of the three studios I've tried that have Brazilian owners.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Commute time
Man, I spend a lot of time on the subway.
It's about a half hour to work in the morning - that's not bad. By comparison, it took me half that time to get to campus in Nashville, only because I went at off hours. During rush hour, it would have been close to a half hour.
But in Nashville, yoga was just a few blocks from campus, and capoeira was about 20 minutes away.
Here, it takes me about 20 minutes to get from work to get to yoga. That's not too outrageous. Getting to capoeira from work, though, is close to an hour, and so is getting to my handstand class. (I have to take four trains from Midtown to Brooklyn to get to handstands. Four!)
So here is a story problem for you: If it takes Turducken 30 minutes to get from home to work, and at least 45 minutes to get from work to capoeira, how long does it take her to get from capoeira back home? Does it change your answer if you know that, geometrically, the three points are the vertices of a right triangle, making the trip home the hypotenuse as the eagle flies? Does it further change your answer if you realize that she is not an eagle, and, because of where the subway lines run, she actually has to go farther out of her way to get home?
The answer: Home-work-capoeira is 75 minutes or so. Capoeira-home covers more miles and takes 45 minutes. This is why I always travel with a book.
Theoretically, I could move close to work. But dropping that commute wouldn't make up for living in Midtown. Or I could stop going to capoeira and handstands, but despite the diversity of the city, there are no perfect substitutes (in the economic sense of the term) for either.
I don't particularly mind the commute, since I can read, except for the handstand one - all that train changing is seriously annoying. However, people seem to be impressed. "You go all the way to Astoria for capoeira?" Seriously, I don't think they'd be any more impressed if I actually went down to Rio every Saturday. (You know, that would only take five hours via Concorde...)
The thing is, my commute time adds up to about two hours on days I go to work and capoeira. The people who are impressed live outside the city and spend an hour each way just going home-work. You do the math.
It's about a half hour to work in the morning - that's not bad. By comparison, it took me half that time to get to campus in Nashville, only because I went at off hours. During rush hour, it would have been close to a half hour.
But in Nashville, yoga was just a few blocks from campus, and capoeira was about 20 minutes away.
Here, it takes me about 20 minutes to get from work to get to yoga. That's not too outrageous. Getting to capoeira from work, though, is close to an hour, and so is getting to my handstand class. (I have to take four trains from Midtown to Brooklyn to get to handstands. Four!)
So here is a story problem for you: If it takes Turducken 30 minutes to get from home to work, and at least 45 minutes to get from work to capoeira, how long does it take her to get from capoeira back home? Does it change your answer if you know that, geometrically, the three points are the vertices of a right triangle, making the trip home the hypotenuse as the eagle flies? Does it further change your answer if you realize that she is not an eagle, and, because of where the subway lines run, she actually has to go farther out of her way to get home?
The answer: Home-work-capoeira is 75 minutes or so. Capoeira-home covers more miles and takes 45 minutes. This is why I always travel with a book.
Theoretically, I could move close to work. But dropping that commute wouldn't make up for living in Midtown. Or I could stop going to capoeira and handstands, but despite the diversity of the city, there are no perfect substitutes (in the economic sense of the term) for either.
I don't particularly mind the commute, since I can read, except for the handstand one - all that train changing is seriously annoying. However, people seem to be impressed. "You go all the way to Astoria for capoeira?" Seriously, I don't think they'd be any more impressed if I actually went down to Rio every Saturday. (You know, that would only take five hours via Concorde...)
The thing is, my commute time adds up to about two hours on days I go to work and capoeira. The people who are impressed live outside the city and spend an hour each way just going home-work. You do the math.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Small things
I mentally map each city I live in to the places I have lived before. Here in New York, Manhattan’s Riverside Park is the equivalent of Nashville’s Shelby Park and Indianapolis’ Monon Trail: the close-to-home greenway. It’s more than a neighborhood playground, but not the city’s crown jewel, and to non-New Yorkers all that matters is that Riverside is Not Central Park and therefore irrelevant.
In my time in Nashville, I found that my neighbors treated Shelby Park like an outpost of a chain gym: a place good for exercise, if short on the finer amenities such as juice bars. Tired of walking on unshaded pavement, I sought out the spaces beyond the paved greenway and the baseball fields, looking for little gems that had disappeared from the maps and contributed little to the park’s efficiency. There was the short path that ran from the dog park past the roadside pagoda to the manmade grotto, a treasure in its own right, even if the water running from it was more often than not fetid. Another path of crumbling pavement was only ¼ mile in length and connected nothing to nothing else.
These were hard-fought discoveries, valuable because of their rarity, even if in truth they weren’t difficult to find. Not many were looking.
In Riverside Park, these prizes are everywhere, yet somehow no less thrilling for their ubiquity. Some of them are obvious – the hippopotami and dinosaurs on the playgrounds are known to every dog-walker and jogger. I love dinosaurs as much as the next six-year-old-at-heart, but my real weakness is for the abandoned and forbidden spots: the cordoned-off stairs leading down to a small patio with grass growing up between the flagstones, the glimpses of the Freedom Tunnel running under Riverside Avenue, or the cracks in Employee Only doors.
Best of all are the smallest of discoveries and the happy accidents. The way the light hits the ceiling of some of the tunnels between levels of the park, reflecting off the peeling paint or through the metal grate. The subtle differences in each iron fence and stone wall. And then, on a narrow dirt path running parallel to one of the park’s promenades, there is a brass arrow embedded in the ground like a physical map of pirate booty. Yet it points no place in particular, making it the treasure rather than the map, for anyone paying attention.
This density of discovery is what I love about New York. There are more interesting things in any modest east-west residential block in Manhattan than in a square mile in most cities, and that’s without looking at the, as the cliché has it, “colorful people.”
To say these are “discoveries” is not to suggest they were heretofore unknown; at best, I get to play Columbus, discovering a land the inhabitants knew was there all along. Certainly there are history buffs, explorers, and even keen-eyed children who know all of these places better than I; many of them have websites to document their finds. Looking at these sites overwhelms me, like trying to decide what to eat a dessert buffet, or flipping through a ludicrously expensive catalog. It’s not just that my eyes are bigger than my stomach; I see their photos and think, that’s not how I would have taken it. I’m no ace photographer, but no one else’s eyes see the world quite the same as your own do. When people encounter something for the first time, without having been taught how to see it before, they’ll bring to it a diversity of interpretations that is impossible at major tourist attractions. (Try taking a novel photo of the Statue of Liberty!)
No, these are discoveries only in that I found them on my own rather than reading about them in a guidebook first. It’s hard to see Grand Central Station except through the lens of a hundred movies. Perhaps the child who grows up passing through the station sees it with fresh eyes – at the cost of being too young to remember that wonder later on. These places that live in our collective imaginations feel familiar, and thus disappointing, but they allow us to agree on rough outlines of the world we inhabit. Everything else, we find on our own, and these personal maps are what make spaces meaningful to us.
Thus while my Riverside Park shares some names and coordinates of each other person’s Riverside Park, giving us a common universe, we are on very different journeys through it.
I get to pretend I’m the only one here, that this is an undiscovered country. I get to pretend that this city, the living creation of millions of people, is a natural phenomenon. It’s not used, “pre-owned,” or, Strunk and White forbid, “pre-loved.” I can pretend I have a right to it even though the wheels on my luggage have barely stopped spinning.
In my time in Nashville, I found that my neighbors treated Shelby Park like an outpost of a chain gym: a place good for exercise, if short on the finer amenities such as juice bars. Tired of walking on unshaded pavement, I sought out the spaces beyond the paved greenway and the baseball fields, looking for little gems that had disappeared from the maps and contributed little to the park’s efficiency. There was the short path that ran from the dog park past the roadside pagoda to the manmade grotto, a treasure in its own right, even if the water running from it was more often than not fetid. Another path of crumbling pavement was only ¼ mile in length and connected nothing to nothing else.
These were hard-fought discoveries, valuable because of their rarity, even if in truth they weren’t difficult to find. Not many were looking.
In Riverside Park, these prizes are everywhere, yet somehow no less thrilling for their ubiquity. Some of them are obvious – the hippopotami and dinosaurs on the playgrounds are known to every dog-walker and jogger. I love dinosaurs as much as the next six-year-old-at-heart, but my real weakness is for the abandoned and forbidden spots: the cordoned-off stairs leading down to a small patio with grass growing up between the flagstones, the glimpses of the Freedom Tunnel running under Riverside Avenue, or the cracks in Employee Only doors.
Best of all are the smallest of discoveries and the happy accidents. The way the light hits the ceiling of some of the tunnels between levels of the park, reflecting off the peeling paint or through the metal grate. The subtle differences in each iron fence and stone wall. And then, on a narrow dirt path running parallel to one of the park’s promenades, there is a brass arrow embedded in the ground like a physical map of pirate booty. Yet it points no place in particular, making it the treasure rather than the map, for anyone paying attention.
This density of discovery is what I love about New York. There are more interesting things in any modest east-west residential block in Manhattan than in a square mile in most cities, and that’s without looking at the, as the cliché has it, “colorful people.”
To say these are “discoveries” is not to suggest they were heretofore unknown; at best, I get to play Columbus, discovering a land the inhabitants knew was there all along. Certainly there are history buffs, explorers, and even keen-eyed children who know all of these places better than I; many of them have websites to document their finds. Looking at these sites overwhelms me, like trying to decide what to eat a dessert buffet, or flipping through a ludicrously expensive catalog. It’s not just that my eyes are bigger than my stomach; I see their photos and think, that’s not how I would have taken it. I’m no ace photographer, but no one else’s eyes see the world quite the same as your own do. When people encounter something for the first time, without having been taught how to see it before, they’ll bring to it a diversity of interpretations that is impossible at major tourist attractions. (Try taking a novel photo of the Statue of Liberty!)
No, these are discoveries only in that I found them on my own rather than reading about them in a guidebook first. It’s hard to see Grand Central Station except through the lens of a hundred movies. Perhaps the child who grows up passing through the station sees it with fresh eyes – at the cost of being too young to remember that wonder later on. These places that live in our collective imaginations feel familiar, and thus disappointing, but they allow us to agree on rough outlines of the world we inhabit. Everything else, we find on our own, and these personal maps are what make spaces meaningful to us.
Thus while my Riverside Park shares some names and coordinates of each other person’s Riverside Park, giving us a common universe, we are on very different journeys through it.
I get to pretend I’m the only one here, that this is an undiscovered country. I get to pretend that this city, the living creation of millions of people, is a natural phenomenon. It’s not used, “pre-owned,” or, Strunk and White forbid, “pre-loved.” I can pretend I have a right to it even though the wheels on my luggage have barely stopped spinning.
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