Bob Dylan Talk

A lot of people I know in this town are in major life transitions right now. Really big changes are going on all around us.

(pause)

Perhaps you're in a state of flux, too.

And one of the things that has been of comfort is that while you think you're way off the path -- that's usually when we get scared -- perhaps you've been on the path all along. Perhaps this is the path right now.

(pause)

Can we trust that it might all be ok?

(pause)

Bob Dylan recently gave a speech in which he mentioned the trajectory of his life. I'm not sure he could have given that speech at any other point in his life, for you need to be able to have hindsight to get that metaphorical 20/20 vision.

Times always change. They really do.  

And his advice was to just keep doing it all. Perhaps, you just show up and trust that it might all be ok. 

Bob Dylan speech-how it inspired me, Sarah Halweil

Be grateful for all of my teachers and interactions even if its not obvious that the person or event of the moment is teaching me. Pause and listen, even when it is challenging. What I am practicing, expressing, and creating does not come from a vacuum, it is inspired by influences of the past and present-all of my teachers. 

Do what inspires me no matter what others think. Practice, practice, practice. 

Its like what Roshi Joan Halifax says, “when you attach to the outcome, usually, the path is not realized and the path can be harmful.” Bob Dylan played and practice because he was inspired not because he was focused on a goal. 

Dont judge the the type of voice but rather the truth that it is speaking-Bob Dylan

Life is short, even on its longest days-John Cougar Mellencamp. 

The hardest thing for any creative person is to recognize the contribution of past creators, to recognize a lineage. We all desire to be unique.
Yet, everything has roots, and roots, to be strong, have to run deep or wide or both.
Bod Dylan has the modesty to acknowledge the “ precedent “  to his songs: traditional folk songs he says, that he would sing, repeat again and again; rock and roll, big band swing orchestra music.
The word here is repetition. Constant practice. Living, breathing those old songs. Diving deep into the emotions they were born from.
“ It’s been a long road “ he says, “it’s taken a lot of doing. “
We do have this feeling of a “ long road “ of “ a lot of doing “, in a yoga practice and study. We feel frustrated often, especially if we respect the lineage, if we repeat practice after practice sequences from Iyengar, Patabi Joi; sequences from Rodney and Colleen. We are bored sometimes when reading yoga texts. We don’t know anymore sometimes where we go and why. We mumble when asked a simple question. We get discouraged, annoyed, but sometimes, suddenly elated.
Because sometimes, suddenly, we feel we are getting closer to an answer, we have a fleeting insight, or a question arises, like how can I access the crown of my head, this elusive point of my body, when lying in Shavasana?
Because sometimes, we feel that we are nearing the mystery of what we are seeking by practicing yoga, we feel that it reaches even further than Shakespeare, cited by Bob Dylan, beyond the turmoil created by emotions that he so masterly touched and described.
We feel that it reaches somehow to the origin of the universe.
And then, it is gone.
Time to get back to work. To practice.

Dylan Assignment

Times always change. They really do. And you have to always be ready for something that's coming along and you never expected it. - Bob Dylan, MusiCares Speech

 

One of the things that brings us to back to our mats over and over is the difficulty we have with change. Everything might be going along just fine and suddenly:  The pipes burst. A loved one falls ill. You lose your job. Your once sweet and pliable child becomes a surly teenager.

 

Things change. And it's hard not to want to hold on to a time when things seemed - at least in our memories - to have been simpler, easier; better.

 

One of the first Dylan songs to influence me was "The Times They Are a'Changing." I was about 14 at the time. It was the 1970's and practically everyone I knew played guitar, and everyone was singing Dylan. A friend of mine taught me the song, and I was blown away by how wise the lyrics were. That last verse:

 

The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

The slow one now

Will later be fast

As the present now

Will later be past

The order is

Rapidly fadin'

And the first one now

Will later be last

For the times they are a-changin'.

 

seemed almost Biblical, or Shakespearean. I find it interesting that Dylan referenced Shakespeare right in the beginning of his MusiCares speech, but it seems natural. Long before I read Hamlet I knew the lyrics to dozens of Dylan songs. And in so many ways they're both dealing with the same, big, insistent questions: what is a human life? Its essence, its nature, its details? What is love? What is time?

 

That afternoon, learning to play that song, was the first time I ever thought about the fact that life is in constant flux, that change is actually a way of identifying and defining life. The moment an organism stops changing, it dies.

 

Yoga keeps us connected to that flow. With each breath, we feel the body change: inhale, and the chest and belly rise, oxygen rushes to our cells, we feel our muscles energize; exhale, the leftovers leave our cells, we turn inwards for a moment, we repose. In the next inhale, we're already different than we were during the previous one. It's so incredible and constant, and it mostly happens without our awareness. But when we turn our attention towards that miraculous wave of life coming in, going out, the body changing, the mind changing, then we get to experience the beauty of that process. And the process of change becomes a powerful teacher. Our asana gets stronger because we don't get so rigid in the fluctuations, but allow the rise and swell to take us towards new edges of our physical experience. Our sense of life likewise gets stronger, as we feel more free to abandon our stakehold in the past and more forward into places we could never have imagined. And so life unfolds and we can observe and celebrate the changes rather than cling like frightened children to the shore, the remnants of our past.

 

 

Walking the Road A Million Times -- Reflections on Bob Dylan's MusiCares Person of the Year Speech

Reflections on Bob Dylan’s MusiCares Person of the Year Speech

Victoria Gordon

In Bob Dylan’s 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year acceptance speech, the legendary singer songwriter accredits his musical authenticity to having emerged through the DNA of traditional music.  

Dylan humbly asserts that through learning, listening to and singing the traditional folk songs, his unique voice (which define him as an artist), emerged.  While his songs are unarguably authentic, they were passed to him through a lineage of composers.  The fabric of his music was woven with the thread of his predecessors. 

 “These songs didn’t come out of thin air.  I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth….these folk songs…gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.”  

Dylan underscores the importance of practice.  Incessant practice.  One has to “walk down the roads a million times” before paving a new one.  He infers through that in order to transcend the boundaries and crack the code of finding your authenticity as an artist, one must first know the boundaries (or in this case, the rubric of traditional music).   Dylan’s “new” songs emerged from old, and took their own authentic shape with a process of which he claims he had little control:

After singing “all these ‘come al’ ye’ songs all the time, you’d be writing, ‘come gather ‘round people wherever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown…The times they are a-changing.’…There’s nothing secret about it…They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.” 

In a similar light, yoga and its eight limbs, is a practice.  Not only has yoga been bequeathed from a lineage of an (arguably) 5,000 year old tradition in the board sense, yoga is a practice we can had down to ourselves each time we arrive at our mat, in an individual sense.  Through learning the alignment and intelligence behind the asanas, pranayama, yamas and niyamas, the “secret” is revealed.  As Dylan offers about his musical process, “there is really no secret about it.  You just do it unconsciously because that it enough."  

We can hear Dylan’s words resonate with ashtanga guru Sri. K. Pattabhi Jois’ discovery “practice and all is coming” — walk the road a million times, keep showing up, keep editing, and we might just get closer to discovering our own authenticity.   It will be enough.

I love this powerful excerpt from the transcript in the Los Angeles Times of Bob Dylan's MusiCares speech.
Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice. He said, "Well that's very kind of you,but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead, they matter only if they can convince you they are telling the truth".
When I practice yoga. Well... some days I just don't like what I see and feel. It is painfully far from pretty,lovely or blissful. Then the break through comes when I give up control and allow the practice to unfold and reveal itself, The resistance crumbles and I feel liberated. Even if it means allowing uncomfortable feelings to rise like anger or sadness. They rise and somehow lose their hold just becoming part of the messy and wonderful whole. We love a sweet lie but I believe our souls long for the truth. Sam Cooke describes as a measure of a man's voice a man who speaks from the truth. I think he means a man abiding in the whole of who he is... capable of revealing the soul with unflinching clarity and able to convey that to others. Now I can't sing very well but this is my aim in practice. Each day I get on the mat to pay attention and I endeavor to abide in the truth no matter what and express it so others can hear it too.  The beauty is in the authenticity.
I'm sure thats why I loved Bob Dylan's songs growing up they were always so raw and real and sometimes felt like a heart ache or a belly ache but I knew they were true.

     Two quotes from the Dylan article, both on the same plane, were very impactful for me.
When explaining how he learned to write lyrics (from listening to other lyrics which he even references) he said: "Everything belongs to everyone." and later, "I opened up a door in a different kind of way.  It's just different, saying the same thing."
    Dylan strikes me as  a man who has done his svadhyaya "homework." Here is this legend, who, when doing his own reading, his own self-study, recognizes the awareness of himself as a tiny part of a universal consciousness.  By extension,  we all share successes and failures, talents and self doubts, strengths and weaknesses, confidence and anxiety.  It is our way of expressing them that is uniquely ours.  Same doors, different way of opening. 

From Pierre Bismuth:

Bob Dylan was not part of my culture. I have really started listening to him and reading his lyrics when I received the home work. I am reading his autobiography and  listen to all the singers who have inspired him and reading the lyrics. This is how I rediscovered  Johnny Cash and found this  Joni Mitchell ‘s lyrics

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all…

…I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all
… I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

  I am not progressing very fast but it is a wonderful journey in an unknown past for me.

Two Spiritual teachings from Bob Dylan’s talk to MusicCares

Whose opinions matter to you? 

As Dylan said in Up to Me on his Biograph album:

If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve diedI was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanitySomeone had to reach for the risin’ star, I guess it was up to me

In his MusicCares Person of the Year acceptance speech, Dylan says that his songs had detractors & supporters.  But when writing a song, he wasn’t thinking about what others thought of his songs. Many of his detractors didn’t understand or like his music.  But “If you have to have somebody’s blessing – you figure it out.”  He didn’t care so much about the opinions of those who wrote “novelty songs [that] weren’t saying anything serious.”  He preferred the blessings of those who wrote songs that “broke my heart;” that “shook the essence of humanity,” that “would never decay and still resound to this day.”

So look inside yourself and determine whether what you’re doing/saying resounds with your own truth.  Take in what others might say, but take more stock in the opinions of those whom you respect.  Life’s not about pleasing everyone.  It’s about being true to yourself.  If you’re seeking someone’s blessing, make sure it’s the blessing of those whose opinion resonates with your truth.

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"Times always change.  They really do.  And you have to always be ready for something that’s coming along and you never expected it.”  Bob Dylan from his 2015 MusicCares Person of the Year Acceptance Speech 

"The Times They Are A-Changin'"

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

…

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don't criticize

What you can't understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is

Rapidly agin'

Please get out of the new one

If you can't lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin'

So find your center, and ground yourself for stability.  But don’t fight change.  Stay true to yourself and “swim” so you don’t “sink like a stone.”  Lend your hand as change presents itself to you.  Be open and receptive for the new and unexpected.

Bob Dylan MusicCares speech and spiritual teaching: Dharma Talk

(The parallel of how new songs arise from older songs…the roots of one arise from another)

I was listening to Bob Dylan speak about how and why he created songs like he did. How his roots in folk music and living in the sound of some of the great old folk music influenced him and created, for him, the space to create the music he’s so famous for. “All these songs are connected. Don't be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It's just different, saying the same thing.” (BD) How his songs were extensions, not new creations. 

Our history and prior experience create new experience. It is, as we know, all connected. And in our yoga practice, we are working to support that connection…mind, body, breath, movement, past, present. Letting it all be NOW.  

In yoga asana practice we are always evolving. We can create beautiful ways of being and doing and also habits and behaviors that may not always serve us. 

In practice today let’s let go of the song we have in our head already…the one we wake up to, go to sleep to and sing again and again. Let go of the knowing, the expectations we bring to our mat. Let’s soften around all of that expectation. Letting go, aparigraha-non-grasping of what we think we know, what we believe should happen in practice…the shapes we expect, the limitations we anticipate the opening we expect…and let’s be open to a new song arising. 

Let our awareness in practice today rest in a different vantage point. Let the page of sheet music be blank/fresh and clear. And while everything we are still shows up on our mats, in our practice…just for today, be open to the idea of finding something new to experience. Greet each shape as though it was the first time and see how the music can change, evolve and grow. See what happens.

Basia Kinglake:

Oliver Sacks, a neuroscientist known for a couple of books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakening, recently wrote a piece in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times.  He has just learned that he has terminal cancer – in his liver – and that he has only a limited time left in his life.

He writes:

“I feel a sudden clear focus. There is no time for anything unessential.”

And:

“Above all I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet and that, in itself, has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

During a recent workshop, Richard Rosen said:

“ Your breath, your life has a message. All you need to do is close your eyes, back up and watch. Your breath is the movie.”

And Richard Freeman wrote:

“Painful emotions are used to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage.”

And

“Fearless is the first requisite of spirituality.”

 And so, as Johnny Cash wrote – in the Bob Dylan piece –

“ Get rhythm, get rhythm

When you get the blues.”