A Tantra Look at a Bionic Man

I’ve written before about my ticking heart, and how the sound of it is almost always with me.  I had been told before the surgery that there was a chance that I would be able to hear my valve click, but I had no idea what that meant.

About a day after the surgery, when the heavy painkillers were wearing off, I heard an interesting sound coming up out of my throat.  I had heard sounds there before, an occasional gurgling noise that I assumed everyone heard and was some kind of digestive process.  This new sound came from the same place, but was a sharp tick.

As I came to and the sound continued I started to understand what had happened.  That gurgling that I would occasionally hear was in fact my old, failing aortic valve, as blood sloshed through inefficiently and noisily.  My new valve, engineered with precision, allowed my heart to work as intended, and would make that sound with every opening and closing as long as my heart beat.

It is a strange thing to live with, that sound.  It reminds me that I am two parts, one made flesh, bone, and fluid, the other made of carbon fiber, stainless steel, and plastic.  Some days I am grateful for it, because it is what keeps me alive where my old valve was simply not able to keep going.  Some days it is maddening, particularly in quiet, bare rooms (like a yoga studio), when the tick tick tick drowns out every other sound.  Some nights as I lie in bed and the ticking is all that I can think about I look over at my wife.  She stirs, frowns, then tilts her head.  She is listening for the tick, because for two years that has allowed her in a half-conscious sleep to know that I was there next to her, healthy and alive.  She hears it, smiles, and drifts back into slumber. 

Tonight I sat on our quiet couch, breathing steadily to the beat of the ticks, reading the history of Yoga and the differences between Classical Yoga and Tantra.  The Classic study engages the practitioner in the idea that we can move past the material to better understand the greater consciousness of the world.  It is dualistic, seeing our existence in two parts, one to be surpassed while the other is pursued.  Tantra, on the other hand, simply sees them as part of the whole.  You should not seek to move past the material to seek a greater consciousness because the material, your body, is part of that great consciousness.  “All of this”, my guide says, “is nothing but that”. 

As I read that I felt my shoulder sink, my chest relax, the tension leave my face.  What is this is also that.  The warm, fluid, soft but hard body is also the strong, mechanical, loud and proud body, and is nothing but me. 

This is that, and is me, and is us. 

Pranayama in the Emergency Room

Last night I spent an unusually long time in an emergency room.  This happens to me a lot.  Pretty much any time that I call a doctor and the words “chest pain” and “prior heart surgery" come out, they send me right to the ER.  So when I called my GP and asked if someone could just give me a quick listen as I was having some unusual chest pain (and the reality is that I have pretty much constant chest pain), they insisted that I head right to the hospital.  Unfortunately I got to the ER in the middle of a flu outbreak and days after New Year’s resolutions started, so the place was filled to the gills with sneezers, coughers, and people retching their way through detox.

Throughout it all, I remained calm.  Funny how yoga does that to you.

When other people were raging “I’ve been here for two hours!  Where’s the fucking doctor!”, I would follow up with triage and say, “Excuse me, I told myself I would only check in every 90 minutes or so, but would you be able to tell me where I am on the list?  Another few hours to go?  Thank you very much”.  I spent roughly seven hours in the waiting room, with one paperback book (The Man Who Never Missed, a kung-fu & yoga filled sci-fi novel) and a half-charged Itouch.  Between chapters I spent a lot of time practicing pranayama.  A lot.  Seriously, hours and hours of controlled breathing, each breath in taking four heartbeats, each breath out four heartbeats.  Since I have a mechanical aortic valve each beat carries an audible tick that I can always hear, so I learned over the hours to time my breath to the four beats.  Once in an examine room I switched to meditation, and kept the breath practice between x-rays and blood tests.  Around 3am they sent me home with a couple of Tylenol. 

Today I went to my standard Tuesday night yoga practice, which involved a little less movement than usual and a lot of holding strong poses.  After half an hour or so I noticed that there was change in the way I held poses.  It was the breathing.  The four beats in, four beats out rhythm that I established to pass the time in the ER was the same breath that I used throughout my practice. 

Sometimes adversity is just an opportunity to learn.  Namaste.

Who's a Yoga Flake?

I think that there is a popular perception of yoga practitioners as, well, flakes.  Granola eating, vegetarians, always talking about chakras and natural fibers and what’s for sale at Whole Foods.  Basically a walking clichés right out of Dharma & Greg reruns.

To some extent it’s true, we are like that, but spend some time at a yoga center and see who is there.  Tourists looking for a new experience drop in, and sometimes they can be flaky and have crazy expectations about yoga.  People who stick to it, though, are definitely not flakes.  They tend to be driven, “A” type personalities.  

I used to say of runners that we are all running to something or away from something, and that it is usually the latter.  The same can hold true for a yoga center.  There seems to be something that holds people to long term practices.  I look around a class sometimes and see people who are so driven to manage their lives that they look to yoga for some kind of grounding, but find themselves driven instead by the need to establish the perfect practice.

At the center where I go what they learn instead is that there is no perfect practice.  Also, there is no spoon.  Whoa.

And then there are the teachers.  Today I finished my first weekend of a twelve month yoga teacher training program, and I can say with confidence that there are no yoga flakes.  We may talk about an energetic connection between bodies, and about chakras and mudras, things that make the average persons eyes roll.  I can tell you, though, that as I look around the class the one thing that I see us all struggling with is the idea that we have to slow down and maybe, just maybe, not be perfect.  Yoga flakes indeed.

How You Go From Yoga to Shooting

Today was my first day of the 200 hour yoga teacher training.  Lots to discuss, but let’s start with the lunchtime conversation I had with a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force, with multiple combat tours under her belt, who also teaches yoga.  She lead classes for a Special Forces group in 2002.

I told her that in my experience yoga makes me more peaceful, so how do you go from yoga to shooting?

She said that people in the military aren’t out to shoot people, and that an operation goes best when no one has to fire a shot.

“Yes”, I said, “that may work for 98% of the people in the military, but a lot of times when Special Forces go out it is specifically to kill someone, yet they are the ones that seem to be into yoga.  How does that work?”

“When they go out they want to pull the trigger as little as possible”, she told me, “and when they do pull the trigger they want to do it accurately.  Yoga helps them control heart rate, focus, concentration, so they can do their jobs right and be emotionally stable when it’s over.  And when they do kill someone, it is because the person they killed was going to do something much worse later.”

The class is full of veterans from many, many wars.  Some came to yoga through VA programs for post-traumatic stress disorder; some found their way to yoga on their own.  They look at me like I am some kind of tough survivor with my scars and bionics.  Yoga teacher training is a wild place.  

Learn more at the Veterans Yoga Project.

Wisdom of Jedi

“Direct action is not always the best way. It is a far greater victory to make another see through your eyes than to close theirs forever.”- Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II 

She’s one of the villains.  Oh, the irony.

Deus Ex & the Pacifist Run

Many role playing games for computers and consoles have introduced a “morality system” that allows you to cast your character as a hero or villain, depending on your temperament at the time.  In the early days the distinctions were pretty simple. For example, a little old lady only has half the money she needs for rent and the tyrannical landlord is coming soon.  Do you:

Pay the second half of her rent?  Hero!

Stab her and take what little money she has?  Villain!

As games got more morally complex, the answers did not always seem obvious.  For example, if you kill the landlord and turn the deed over to the little old lady, are you a cold blooded murder?  Or did you save the woman from eviction?

If you provide the rent money to the woman, then swindle all of the rent money plus the deed from the landlord, are you a thief?  Maybe, but at least this time you didn’t kill anyone.

In recent years the morality systems presented in games by companies like BioWare and Obsidian have been less black and white, focusing on the differences between a subtle approach (paragon, open palm, light side of the Force, etc) and a direct approach (renegade, closed fist, dark side of the Force, etc).  Okay, the differences between the approaches in the Knights of the Old Republic games can be argued.  But even in systems like these it is possible to play a character categorized as an honorable person who looks for peaceful solutions, but ultimately leaves a trail of bodies in his or her digital wake.  What is a peace-minded gamer yogi to do?

There is a growing group of gamers who look for “pacifist runs”, games where it is possible to play in such a way that you never kill a single enemy.  One such game is Deus Ex: The Human Revolution, a near-future prequel to the excellent cyberpunk influenced Deus Ex from 2000.  DX:HR has lots of interesting points to consider (and I am only 1/4 of the way through so far) but let’s just stick to it’s potential for pacifism.

For a game where you play a bionic super-soldier with enhancements that allow you to carry huge machine guns and stab people with arm-knives, there is a lot of flexibility to how you navigate the story.  Most of the game’s challenges can be overcome by combat, stealth, hacking, influence, or some combination thereof.  From a combat standpoint, in addition to the assault rifles and rocket launchers you also have access to a number of non-lethal weaponry, like tranquilizer darts, stun guns, concussion grenades, etc.  You also have the ability to sneak up behind opponents and knock them unconscious.  Sound peaceful?

One of these moves, by my count, would cause a broken arm, dislocated shoulder, possibly destroy an eye, and finally cause a massive concussion along with a broken nose and many lost teeth.  But hey, the bad guy still lives, right?

The Yogi Gamer

Before yoga & vegetarianism

At my weekly Dungeons & Dragons night I told one of my friends “I don’t think that I can play my character anymore.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“I’m not really in that place any more.  I made Gilbert”, I said, describing my current decadent self-absorbed fighter, “when I was in a really angry place.”  It was true.  Our long time dungeon master had just died, I suffered from a seemingly unending series of medical problems, and nothing looked good.  “But now I’m in a totally different place.”

My friend shook his head.  “I don’t see how that matters.”

“Dude, look.  Since then I’ve stopped drinking, became a vegetarian, and do like three to four hours of yoga a week.”  Honestly the stopping drinking part made me go from two to three drinks a week to none, but it still represented a change.

“So?”

With yoga & vegetarianism

“No meat, no alcohol, and lots of yoga, and all that need to smash people in the head really goes away.  You start feeding homeless people instead,” I said.

“Bullshit.  You are just in a good mood because you are on vacation.”  This was right after Christmas.

“No, I should be in a worse mood because I’ve spent most of my vacation visiting family and sitting in traffic.”

My friend wouldn’t give up.  “You’ve been in a good mood before, right?”

“Sure.”

“But in the end you always want to fucking kill something eventually, right?”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Trust me,” he said.  “By the end of the night you are going to want to kill something.”  He’s not only one of my oldest friends, but he’s also my lawyer, so you have to trust, right?

And this takes us to the conundrum of my current gaming life.  In the last two years I’ve had a series of unusual turns in life.  The most interesting was having several sections of my chest removed and replaced with artificial parts (carbon fiber aortic valve, Dacron ascending aorta, and a sternum mostly made out of stainless steel).  Recovery from this involved lots and lots of yoga, something which I had dabbled in for a decade before but which became a weekly part of my life after the surgery.  As I continue my search for an understanding of my new body, and the emotional and spiritual ramifications of this evolution, I have decided to deepen my yoga practice by starting a 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training program at my local studio, the Newington Yoga Center in Newington, CT.

I also still do like to game- dice & minis, computers, Xbox, etc.  And most gaming involves smashing.  Really, though, what I want to do most often now is go up to the monster, give it a good meal and a big hug, and talk out its problems.  If that fails, then the non-lethal takedown of a Vulcan nerve pinch will do.

So where will this take me as I deepen my love for humanity while still gaming?  I’ll share with you as I learn more myself.