I'm sure everyone has heard this tale by now, but here's the NY Times piece on it if you want to dig deeper. It was on the news in Japan too. (You have no idea how many headaches I have trying to explain the stories that come out of the US every week) A temp worker at a Walmart was trampled to death when a mob of bargain-hunters pushed through the glass doors and stampeded the store.
Much hand wringing has been done about the conscious of the American people that the quest for material goods would trump the life of a fellow human being. However, I see the Walmart story in a different light.
In America, it seems that our religion is consumerism, our pilgrimage Black Friday, and our temple Walmart.
Tramplings occur when a large mass of people is drawn so strongly to a single geographic point that logic and self-preservation cease to register as devotion takes over. What will be gained from the pilgrimage outweighs the risk of throwing oneself into a thronging mass of people.
Worshippers going to temples seek sanctity and spiritual fulfillment. The Walmart shoppers were eyeing TVs and digital cameras. But is there really any difference?
See, whether you're lining up to pray at a temple or lining up to get a plasma TV, you're lining up for the same thing. A shot at a life that is somehow better than what you have now.
I met many people in Morocco who saw the Hajj as a kind of turning point in life. They imagined that post-pilgrimage life would somehow be easier, or more rewarding and elevated. I also met a few Hajjis, people who had completed the pilgrimage, who were frustrated with their lives and seemed just as mixed up as the rest of us.
I'm sure we've all had the same experience when buying a consumer product. We imagine that life with that new Plasma TV will be greatly improved. We'll get more out of our leisure time, be more satisfied with our entertainment options, and will be the envy of the neighborhood. So you get the plasma, and find after a few days that life is very much the same. (Personally I'm not so into TVs, I don't even own one. My consumerist fantasies trend towards Mac products, guitars, and video games. What products do you worship readers?)
Behind the death of the Walmart employee and the pilgrims is a deep-seeded dissatisfaction with what is and a mistaken belief that you can do or obtain something that will make that dissatisfaction go away. Nothing will ever make it go away. Let me say that again;
Nothing will ever make your dissatisfaction go away.
It's part of the deal when you're a sentient being. We have the gift of imagination, which can endlessly permutate situations in which you would be happier than you are now. Of course if you are lucky enough to arrive at those situations the imagination just keeps on going to deeper and more complex doodlings about what could be. (You finally got that sports car, but it can only do 0 to 60 in 10 seconds!)
This is the trap of life that was sprung on that unsuspecting Walmart employee this Black Friday, and will continue to ensnare us all until we take a serious look at ourselves and cultivate appreciation of the present moment. We think of ourselves as the cleverest of
animals but we fall for the same trick time and time again. All we can do is try to be a little less stupid tomorrow and not hurt anyone as we bungle through. Meditation helps.
And the employee who was killed was named Jdimytai Damour. He was called Jimbo by his friends, loved politics, Japanese anime, and movies. He was 34.
Can you believe we used to watch The Real World? We would watch hours of people just sitting around on and talking out of their asses. Those days are gone though. More and more, to get on reality TV these days you actually have to be good at something.
So recently I've started watching Project Runway because I had heard so many good things about it. One of the commentators on Slate's Culture Gabfest sold me on it when she talked about how enjoyable it was to watch people "do their craft." That's just the kind of thing I love on Top Chef, so I thought Project Runway would be fun to watch.
I downloaded season one and although I found it to be a well produced and thoughtful take on the fashion industry. The contests aren't too game-showy, and there is a level-headedness to the whole affair which one wouldn't expect from a reality show about fashion.
One thing I found strange was the extreme time constraints the competitors had to stick to, such as designing a dress in 3 hours. At most they got one full day to complete their projects and I could see that some of them were really suffering from these rules. You could tell that some of them, like me, just work at a leisurely pace and don't force things to happen. Often if you sit with a project for a day or two the solution reveals itself more elegantly than just pushing through.
If you want to watch the first season don't read any further cause I'm going to spoil it pretty good.
I was struck by the final episode, in which the designers actually had 3 months to design a full fashion line. At last we could see how good they really were if given enough time to think through their projects. One of the finalists was in LA where she worked professionally. The other, the loveable Jay, was from the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. One of the hosts of the show went and visited the finalists and it was really amazing to see the kind of place Jay came from. It really was a one horse town filled with the kind of people for whom the fashion world was as far away as Mars. Jay's workshop was in a dreary one level pre-fab house set on concrete. And out of this severely depressing corner of America this bright, bold designer had bloomed. Here's some of Jay's fashions from throughout the final competition.
In the final exhibition all the finalists showed well, but there was a zing to Jay's fasion that the other competitors didn't bring, and he came out on top, winning the season.
When the judges were discussing the merits and weak points of the finalists, it came up that the lady from LA's fashions looked "very Gucci." She protested that she had been designing that way for years, but the judges were looking for something that surprised them.
The judges all marveled at how original and personal Jay's looks were. One of them said something like "Jay is just sitting in the middle of nowhere, and he's got nothing but himself for inspiration. So we're getting pure Jay."
Now I believe that the other competitor was also designing from her heart, but, perhaps by living in LA her ideas were somewhat muddled by the proximity to a major fashion center, and the overall impact of her designs suffered as a result.
So what am I getting at here? What does this have to do with anything?
Well, living in Japan, I often feel much like Jay in his little brick house. No one over here is particularly into the kind of things I'm doing (wellness and design) and my only connection to people doing that kind of stuff is through the web or months old magazines. I feel like this has given me a lot of freedom of thought that allows me to draw on my own resources without a bunch of cross contamination. It's tough in that I have to self-start everything I do, but freeing in that there's no one telling me it shouldn't be done, can't be done, or has already been done. I just plow ahead in my ignorance and things usually work out.
So my advice for anyone who really wants to live the creative life is to not think that simply moving to New York or wherever is going to automatically jumpstart your imagination. In fact, it might do the opposite. You might end up just following the crowd, and wondering where all those good ideas you had went. Give yourself some distance from the people trying to succeed in your field, and you won't fall into the habit of groupthink. When you come back from the wilderness you will have armfuls of fresh ideas and everyone will be like, "where was this person hiding!?"
Recently I've been paying more attention than usual to the space between my legs. No, not that space, I mean the group of muscles that make up what we somewhat lamely refer to as "the groin."
Most people have no idea how this area of the body works, and the way we've built our modern lives we are rarely called upon to activate the muscles of our inner thighs. This is because we live in an overly forward moving, linear world. Most of our daily movements consist of walking forwards in straight lines, climbing stairs set at right angles, sitting in chairs with our knees sticking out in front of us, or lying down with the legs sticking straight out. All of this leads to the groin being seen as a kind of gray area (much like the back) that we don't know much about and don't care to know much about, thank you very much.
It is only when you take up a non-linear activity such as soccer, yoga, or a martial art that you start to see how important this mysterious group of muscles is. 2008 has been the year of the groin for me, as I finally got fed up with being woefully inadequate for some of the open leg poses that I as a teacher am paid to know something about.
So through a whole series of special trainings I've added about two feet to my open leg maximum and am getting closer to my goal of performing complete open leg box splits. Every week I'm gaining about a centimeter.
Recently, I've contracted TakakoHamada, one of the best yoga teachers I've ever met, to give me some private lessons/sessions focusing groin and hip flexibility. We meet for two hours a week and they are incredibly intense classes. Takako's methods are passed on directly from some of the most well known yogis in the world, whose names she has asked me not to divulge, and they work. Using straps, sticks and patience, we've put space where I thought I had long ago reached my max.
What I want to talk about specifically today is my experience in Takako's session last week. As always it was extremely deep and powerful yoga that left me a quaking mess afterwards. However, after recovering I felt great, my legs seemed to have little Hermes-like wings on them. Riding my bicycle after the session, I thought someone might have greased my bike chain because the ride was so smooth. I quickly realized that no, in fact it was my legs that were circulating more smoothly. Very cool.
But the changes were just starting. As you can guess at any one time I have about 12 projects that need completing. Be it PCP stuff, studio maintenance, graphic design, or just the usual paying bills washing dishes kind of stuff. Like most people I have a few projects that I haven't decided how to conclude yet, and they circulate in the back of my mind for months at a time.
Well, the funny thing was, after the deep groin stretches, suddenly the solutions to many of these long term never-seem-to-get-done projects seemed so clear. I kept on having these "why didn't I think of that before!?" moments. A few examples, all from the 4 hours following the deep groin stretches:
I figured out how to set up a ballet bar in the studio with drilling into the walls. I'm going to run the bar off of the vertical window sills, with a bar that is able to be taken down when not in use.
I chose and bought some carpet for the changing room of the studio, after waffling for weeks about whether it was a good idea and if it was what pattern to chose.
I took a fresh look at my kitchen fan which was making a terrible racket when turned on. For the first time I noticed that there was a little string that I could pull on. When I pulled it a little metal flap was opened behind the fan. It turns out that the metal was hitting the fan blade. I had looked at this thing a good 10 times trying to find the problem and only today did I see the solution.
I figured out a way to save a corrupted podcast, by editing it as a movie soundtrack in a movie program I rarely use.
I made some calls I had been putting off forever about getting a new sign for the studio.
I went to a Real Estate agent and got the ball rolling for my friend who is looking to open an office around here.
and many more...
It was as if after the stretches something had just gotten unlocked. Creative, problem solving energy was flowing through me.
As you probably know I am not into any of the "new-age" aspects of yoga practice, I don't go much in for chakras, crystals, chanting, and anything that takes you away from the fundamental experience of being completley in your body. However, people who do know something about this far out stuff would have a name for what I experienced following the hip opening stretches.
What I described matches almost perfectly with the experience of awakening the Kundalini energy. Kundalini is visualized as a snake coiled three times around the base chakra (the Muladhara, for those keeping score). Usually the energy is "sleeping" and dormant, but under certain circumstances it is awakened and the subject feels an intense level-up in energy levels as the serpent rises through the higher chakras. Guess where the base chakra supposedly is? Yep, at the base of your spine, in the hip and groin region. Here's a very new-age visualization of what this energy would look like:
I don't for a second believe that there is a system of energy channels running through my body that resembles the chakra mythology. The idea of seven chakras spinning along my midline, each one responsible for different aspects of my physiology, seems a patently human construction. Nothing we can find in nature works so neatly or from such a top-down design system.
However, I have been humbled time and time again by how the ancient ideas do explain a great many things about the body that science hasn't resolved yet. I believe there must some physical connection between the groin region and increased clarity of mind and sureness of purpose. Perhaps one day medical science will find that an intense hip stretch stimulates the brain to produce more of a certain chemical that helps clarity of thought. There is no doubt in my mind that something is going on there and that it explains why the ancients pictured coiled raw energy as being nestled in the hip and groin area.
While that initial burst of creative power has receded somewhat, I still find myself getting an enormous amount done 4 days after the stretches in question. Where before I would usually lose my concentration or get mired in small details, I am able to delegate problems and keep my eye on the overall picture as I move forward with my work and projects.
So if you'd like to try the groin-productivity connection for yourself, I'd start with UpavisthaKonasana, which you can start exploring here.
If all goes well this blog will be updated weekly from here on out. The conclusion of the recent rounds of PCPers and my moving house put Here Lies Patrick on the backburner for a few months. Sorry about that!
Tramplings occur when a large mass of people is drawn so strongly to a single geographic point that logic and self-preservation cease to register as devotion takes over. What will be gained from the pilgrimage outweighs the risk of throwing oneself into a thronging mass of people. 
