Wholistic Fitness

all photo’s can be clicked to enlarge. photos by ilg.

precisely why most yoga teachers prefer to distance themselves from the notion that distance running is yoga! “Running ruins yoga,” i’ve been told by yoga ‘teachers’ since the eighties. not in this Tribe, baby. in this Tribe? we uphold running as did the Ancient Masters; we consider running for what it truly is…an unequaled pilgrimage of sweat, self, and the long, silent distance. by the time i got back to Flagstaff at the end of my two consecutive days of racing against the Hopi’s on their ancestral, sacred lands my battered feet looked the worse for their wear. within five days, i would take these feet and run them up the Sacred Peak, producing three layers of blisters. Yoga is intended to be self-confrontational. For until you confront your various ‘selves’, transformation – let alone transcendance – is impossible. that is why, in WF, everything that the human body is capable of is considered yoga practice. in WF, nothing is ever pushed away from yoga. it’s all yoga. especially triple-layered blisters begotten from confronting ones limits during endurance footracing.

Within this land of painted deserts which lie like sleeping rainbows across the horizons, monks live.

Monks, native American Hopi’s live perched atop completely silent mesa tops.
look closely at the picture above…what do you see?
go ahead, click on it; enlarge it. tell me what you see.

Second Mesa. within this one picture frame, several villages hide from the Outer World. Their names evoke the mysterious past that has somehow survived into today; Sipaulovi, Mishongnovi, Shungopavi…

wanna try again?
what do you see on this Mesa?

7,000 Hopi live in these villages laced among the sandstone crags and crevices. In little homes, absolutely at Third World standards, there live some the most respectful, kind, and Highly Vibrating people on the plane(t). the smell of pinon fires and roasting green chiles spills into shafts of high sun. Kivas, ceremonial sanctuaries for the Elders, rise from the dirt ‘streets’ which have never seen a car.

to what most of us would clearly see as extreme poverty, this elevated kingdom is our most ancient of cities on Turtle Island. it was the late 1800’s before a paleface ever laid eyes on this intoxicating arid shambala of spiritual wealth. Ceremonies are performed throughout the seasons to honor, to encourage the abundance of life and spirit upon this remote kingdom of rock, sun, and wind.

courtesy of my Hopi family, on the eve before my next footrace, the coach of the Hopi Cross Country running team invited me to the auspicious ceremony known as the “Home Dance” whereupon the entire Hopi Villagers gather at the ancient plaza to honor the simple fact of home, food, and family. surreal. i sat – one of 17 white people among several hundred Hopi – upon one of the rooftops of the ancient homes which are fused together by adobe tracing back thousands of years. by comparison, our ‘modern’ homes are lucky to get to 100. if that.

the last photo i could take before turning off the camera before entering the ancient village of Sipaulovi. photography is strictly forbidden in the Hopi Villages. The next morning, i would race down a section of this road before hitting the ancient footpaths which surround the mesa.

The costumes of the Hopi Ceremonial Dancers were absolute works of art more compelling to me than anything hanging at the Whitney. As the Dance matured, the wind swept up dust from the plaza. Three eagles, fettered to the rooftops, pumped their magnificent wings. Their fierce eyes cut like tomahawks into my observance of their tethered plight. Timelessness. My eyes did not know where to focus; i saw Hopi babies being passed from cousin, to grandmother, back to mom, then to daughter. Beautifully jeweled people these. yet, pitifully ‘poor’ to Western eyes. i thought of my own 10 month-old baby daughter who has yet to meet to her Uncle and has only once or twice known the loving look and feel of her own grandparents. Yet up here on this sandstone spire where integrating self with family, nature, and spirit is the only scene, the quote, “It takes a village to raise a baby,” hit h(om)e.

Poor? perhaps.

Yet, not in what matters most.

For here, so much of what belongs to this culture – aside from the fending off of frostbite during winter and sunstroke during summer – is made of three things;
Family,
Respect of Mother (Earth) and Father (Sky),
and
Engaged Worship of the Great Spirit.

i cannot write more; for this Dance awoke me from a spiritual coma and drew me into a slow motion, drumbeat and concha-driven spiritual ecstasy that far, far outweighed my Hollywood dancing in VIP rooms fueled by ecstasy in pill form. i was caught in the middle of a spirit-to-spirit combat that created for me an emotional avalanche of just how fucked up is the Western addiction to comfort, to electronic acceleration, to spiritless sloth.

i walked,
no…
stumbled like a drunk into the early evening after the Dance…better not stumble to close to the edge; it’s a 600′ drop to the mesaland below! i returned to my Hopi family’s rock walled home which teetered precariously close to the cliff edge. we hung out in the ‘backyard’ which was actually part of tomorrow’s race course; an ancient staircase of stone steps and ledges cut into the cliff wall! i was able to see most of the race course from my Hopi family’s “back perch”. my Hopi ‘mother’ talked well into the twilight. Hopi society is a Maternal one and i was honored to converse with this beautiful elder among the sand sage and lichen graced rimrock of her family’s home. i commented on a budding sage and words never came more easily from my mouth; i felt so Connected with this Hopi family, upon this rock pillar, within this ancient village. in that evening DharmaTalk with Her,
ilg was at h(om)e.

as i climbed into Bala and found a campsite among scrawny pinons,
Grandfather Sun gave way to a far off mesa and sent up a sunset of pale red ocher robes stretched across Father Sky as if to huddle Himself in for the night.

preparing my mealtime of pasta and some mantra-ensconced flesh,
two things struck me most about the Home Dance at the Sipaulovi plaza;
the smell and the babies.

i have lived both in New York City and in Los Angeles.

NYC is not yet a few hundred years old. LA; even younger.
NYC and LA does not smell very civilized.
and the babies that are being raised in these two Most Cherished Cities of Modern Man are always crying and being passed around from parents to pre-school teachers to babysitters to TV and other contraptions designed to ‘free up’ their parents’ time.

Sipaulovi has been continuously inhabited as a city for at least 5x longer.
and it smells delicious…sage and cedar and aromatic native herbs incense the pure air…
and
in the six hours i spent in the heart of Sipaulovi among dozens of Hopi’s babies; not once did i see or hear a Hopi baby cry. only loved in the arms of a family member.

night fell and the coyotes and stray dogs came.

smelling meat, from my campsite, these poor creatures could not contain their hunger. as has been my pattern, a weakness for ‘rez dawgs’ prompted me to befriend this one, whom i called, Vishnu. though i had not eaten anything after my footrace early in the day save for some roasted corn and knowing that i needed calories for tomorrows competition, i fed Vishnu most of my meat.
before dinner, i had done an hour of asana in the back of Bala; you might be surprised at the postures i can manage using the walls of my ambulatory Cave! i also did 15 minutes of pranayama and meditation.

i was high.

i had maybe eaten 350 calories all day and the race, the drive, the village Dance, and the DharmaTalk with ‘mom’ seized every cell
and catapulted me into a pilgrimage fasting high
that was amplified by my own Practice before dinner.

i felt Sacred.
i felt secure with death and impermanence as my menu for the night.

so, i fed my steak to Vishnu
and smiled, sealed up in my Bala Cave
awaiting the Dawn to prepare me for my final race against the Hopis
on their own ancient lands
never before raced by a white man’s feet.

ilg was as happy as a king in his throne
in this desolate, elevated land
in which the Great Spirit seems to be
unhidden;
each tree a temple,
each bird a rinpoche,
each sideways look at a cloud turns ceremonial
in the simplest yet most profound of ways.

tomorrow;
i will race
upon blistered feet,
a broken back body,
yet
with a spirit renewed.