Heavy Mellow: Death-Affirming Yoga with DANIEL CHAMBERLIN
Daniel Chamberlin is an artist, writer, Yin yoga instructor and meditation teacher based in Muncie, Indiana. He’s also the host of Inter-Dimensional Music, a weekly broadcast of “heavy mellow, kosmische slop, and void contemplation tactics,” heard since 2010 on Marfa Public Radio in Far West Texas and 99.1FM WQRT Indianapolis. His creative practice combines visual art, installation, performance, and audio with mindfulness teaching based on the radical implications of yoga and Zen.
Daniel was kind enough to share some photos and answer some questions about his practice and his multimedia yoga/meditation happenings.
Lay Your Body Down, PlySpace Muncie
As I understand it, Yin yoga is a hybrid of Daoist and Indian Tantric energy work which emphasizes slow, gentle stretching of connective tissue and joints. Is this an accurate definition? Why have you gravitated toward this particular style, rather than more intense forms of yoga?
For my installations and classes, I introduce Yin as an inversion of the yogic practices that I imagine many people are gonna be familiar with: “exercise” yoga, vinyasa, hatha, these are all Yang yoga, as in the Taoist concept of yin/yang. We can think about that kind of yoga in terms of ascent, moving into the light, stoking heat, building strength, pairing movement with breath. Yang practices are life-affirming.
Where Yang is reaching, Yin is sinking. It’s a cooling practice, pairing movement with gravity’s pull. It’s meant to be free from striving, but not always comfortable. The challenge comes from remaining in stillness while holding a pose for three to five minutes, or longer. We’re not forcing a stretch so much as letting gravity slowly pull our bodies apart. Woe to the newcomer who mistakes the stillness for lack of intensity.
As the teacher Sarah Powers writes, savasana, or corpse pose, is the ultimate Yin pose: At the end of our lives we become completely yin.
Yin is death-affirming yoga.
I’ve been practicing yoga off and on for 20 years, but only recently became a Yin teacher. I tried Yin because I’m interested in slow, intense things. It worked really well before and after meditation, and I also enjoyed practicing while listening to music. Cranking the speakers and sinking into the sound, responding to the audio, sort of like extremely slow dancing: Yin yoga slow jams.
It works great with ambient, drone, New Age, or funeral doom, the graceful, gloomy long-form style of metal made by bands like Bell Witch and Mournful Congregation. But I also enjoy the challenge of remaining still in a mildly uncomfortable pose while jamming faster stuff like grindcore, noise, or death metal.
Indianapolis Zen Center
You’re a dual practitioner of Yin yoga and Buddhist zazen. How are these practices complementary? In your experience, is Yin yoga more compatible with seated meditation than other approaches to yoga?
I was living at the Indianapolis Zen Center when I started Yin yoga teacher training in 2017. We included yoga in our weekend retreats, but without a yoga teacher, it was a “freestyle practice” more accurately described as “a bunch of practitioners dozing or quietly rolling around on the floor and farting.” As fun as that could be, I thought we might benefit from instruction. The guiding teacher at IZC, Linc Rhodes, suggested that I become a teacher, so I enrolled in training with another extraordinary teacher, Michelle Finch, at Invoke, an excellent Indianapolis studio.
Yin works well with meditation practice because it stretches the parts of the body that get sore while sitting without getting anyone too riled up.
Linc likes to say that the goal of meditation is to “be in the room.” The familiar Zen trick there is that you’re already in the room, so you’ve already achieved that goal, you just have to recognize it.
With yoga – Yin or Yang – my goal is to be in my body. And just as with the goal of being in the room, there’s no other place I can be. That idea is more immediate with this slow kind of yoga because so much of the practice is lying in stillness with your body in some slightly awkward configuration, seeing how it feels to remain present in a state of self-inflicted discomfort.
When I’m leading a group in one of my “mindfulness installations,” I want it to feel less like a class and more like a dance, or some other kind of ritual. I’m not a lineage holder, dharma teacher, physical trainer, or therapist. I aspire to be more of a “spiritual friend” sharing the things I’ve experienced, and less of an authority.
I am a certified yoga teacher, but for these installations I’m an artist first. Yoga is only one part of these experiences. I invite participants to nap, meditate, vibe with the tunes, hold a pose for as long as they want, or zone out to the projections.
Zen Master Seung Sahn – the lineage holder that founded the Kwan Um School of Zen of which IZC is a part – talks about finding your way out of “the provisional realm of names and forms” to a place “before thinking.” After I introduce the basic Yin concepts, I encourage participants to stop trying to understand what’s happening, other than being mindful of pain and injury.
Chi, prana, piezoelectricity, “juice,” these are all signifiers for the physical sensations that are taking place, and by using them we’re creating another layer of thinking around the direct experience of the moment. Feel the feeling as it is, and try not to name it. See if you can avoid using the terminology that someone else has assigned to the sensation, with all of the distracting implications, narratives, and judgements that may come with that name. Maybe for today don’t worry if you’re stimulating the correct meridians for the season or whatever.
In meditation, we focus on the breath as a constant, something that’s happening whether we’re paying attention to it or not. Gravity is a similar constant. A force of nature that gives shape to the galaxy and also makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Like the breath, gravity is something we can learn from when we pay attention to it without trying to figure it out. That’s where the name that I use for these mindfulness installations and yoga experiences – “basking in gravity” – comes from.
What’s the role of psychedelics in your aesthetic-spiritual life? Has psychedelic experience been in harmony or conflict with your yogic-meditative practice?
There’s a 1976 Ram Dass recording, “Motives for Spiritual Practice,” where he talks about how “by going in and out of different realities we’re loosening the hold of one reality over another.” That’s one of the things that I’ve learned from psychedelic experience, to let go of trying to control reality and force it into some kind of narrative where things make sense. That’s also something that I’ve learned from Zen practice, to let go of the story and stop trying to figure my life out.
With both meditation and psychedelic experience, I want to let go of expectations in order to avoid becoming exhausted by trying to moderate the incoming perceptions or document the revelations. But it’s also true when the experience is less than what I was expecting.
I ate some psilocybin mushrooms last fall while staying at a backcountry camp up in the Adirondacks. I had all these ideas of how the mushrooms might interact with the turning leaves, the smell of the deep woods in autumn, all that good stuff.
As the day unfolded, my partner was reporting some mild visual effects, but I didn’t feel like anything was happening for me. I was starting to feel disappointed.
We ended up lying on a blanket staring up at the tree canopy, watching the branches swaying and creaking, leaves swirling and drifting with the breeze. My perception suddenly felt so profound and beautiful! Eventually I realized that I wasn’t getting anything extra from the mushrooms though. I was just seeing the trees as they are, in part because I was scrutinizing my sensations for something hallucinogenic.
For me, meditation and psychedelics both help in discerning the transcendent within the mundane, and realizing that it’s all transcendent, every breath and sensation is imbued with the deepest truth. And then recognizing in turn that those deep truths are nothing new, that they’re just as common as the breath, always present and waiting to be realized. Whether it’s meditation or psychedelics, neither thing is a special discovery only for you. Anyone can enter the stream.
It’s like the difference between using a GPS to find your way around, or using a map and compass. As with psychedelics, one might expect the GPS to give you a route to your destination, and some idea of how long it’s going to take you to get there.
But the GPS is a complicated layer of interference between you and the direct experience of reality. The batteries can die, or you can lose satellite reception, and then what do you do? When I first moved to Muncie I used a GPS all the time, but I didn’t learn how to find my way to the grocery store until I turned it off.
Meditation is more like using a map and compass: It can be difficult to figure out where you are because you’ve gotta understand the symbols and topographic lines and how to calibrate your position. It takes longer, and you have to trust your mind.
They’re both methods of exploring realities, but with a compass you have to learn more in order to orient yourself. Until you realize that there’s nowhere to go and just sit.
Untitled (Opuntia Maps 6), 2014
You’re a visual artist, and much of your work so far seems to involve digitally manipulated photographs of natural subjects. You’ve identified your work with “an explicitly psychedelic post-landscape photography” that breaks with the tradition of Ansel Adams and others, with the goal of disrupting “anthropocentric notions of perspective” and expressing your own “communion” with a shamanistic “plant mind.” Could you please elaborate on what you’re dismantling or working against — e.g., how traditional landscape photography serves to reinforce anthropocentrism and alienation from nature?
I got serious about making visual art in 2010 after I moved from Los Angeles to Far West Texas, where I was working full time as a medic on the ambulance in Marfa. I’d do three or four 24-hour shifts in a row and come home and just wanna disappear into some other headspace.
It seemed like success as a traditional landscape photographer was determined in terms of advanced equipment, a high level of technical proficiency, and special subject matter: Haul a medium format camera up to some remote high altitude meadow on the special day when an endangered flower was in bloom and the light was just absolutely perfect. That sounds like a great backpacking trip to me, but I don’t wanna lug all that photography gear around.
Untitled (Opuntia Maps 1), 2014
So I’d be sitting in my house on my day off and looking at some boring photo of a nopal paddle, zooming in on textures, spines and wrinkles. I wanted to make it something more than it was, but without too much manipulation of the image content, like using an otherworldly amount of saturation or whatever. And so I started duplicating the image and rotating it and making landscapes from a small section of cactus or a square of pinyon canopy, eliminating the horizon line or other points of reference, sort of like aerial photography of micro-landscapes. Creating a visual drone, disorientation through repetition.
Riparian Grasses 1. Chinati Hot Springs, Far West Texas, 2012
It’s that idea of finding the transcendent within the mundane again. Making something spectacular out of a very normal photo of a common plant that’s growing right next to the parking lot: That’s the break with the iconic approach to traditional landscape photography. My digital camera is only slightly more complicated than the camera on your mobile phone. And the editing – repeating and mirroring – is something you can do with any image to start spinning out sacred geometries, tickling that part of the brain that gets stoked about bio-symmetry, conjuring faces in the canvas.
It’s an attempt to reinforce the idea that “nature” is something that we’re a part of, not something that is elsewhere. Both on a practical level, as suggested by artist and ecologist Nance Klehm in her work with urban foraging, identifying edible and useful plants in vacant lots. And on a theoretical level, like the dismantling of hierarchical ecological thinking that philosopher Timothy Morton talks about in Ecology Without Nature. A sort of Buddhist, non-binary ecology of interdependence.
I’m certainly not a shaman! But I was reading a lot of Jeremy Narby at the time too. The Cosmic Serpent got me all worked up about the implications of the overlap in traditional plant medicine and molecular biology. His Intelligence in Nature collection left me thinking about the metaphorical idea that while plants don’t have brains, what if we thought of plants as brains? Thus the “plant mind” language.
All of that led to Ecstatic Camouflage, my first solo exhibition at Marfa Book Co. in 2012.
Since then I’ve started doing more cutting and pasting of both photographs and video, taking fragments of the original images and animating them into slow-moving video projections or mandalas. But the idea remains more or less the same.
My most recent work, Dead Bird Blues, is an installation that includes yoga, meditation, and music to accompany a mandala that I made out of photographs of a Northern Parula, a migratory warbler that I found dead on the sidewalk outside my apartment in downtown Muncie. The mandala moves slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, cycling through a complete sequence over the course of an hour.
The throughline between meditation, yoga, psychedelics, and my visual art is that idea of finding the transcendent within the mundane. Recognizing the sacred in the everyday. And in doing so lowering or eliminating the barrier to entry to that space. You don’t have to go to the mountaintop to find enlightenment, you don’t need to go to a park to experience nature, and you don’t need to be able to touch your toes to be present in your body.
Your radio program, Inter-Dimensional Music, features a dizzying mix of genres and extremes — ambient, New Age, psychedelic folk, metal, noise, etc. Overall, you seem to prefer music with repetition, slow tempos, long tones — i.e., drone. Also, you’ve described your photography as “organic visual drone.” Is “drone” a unifying concept for you, one which brings together contemplative, artistic, and musical practices? If so, why?
The guideline for the radio show is more like “whatever music that I like right now,” with the added rule of “never all white dudes.” But the lack of coherent narrative content is also a common element.
Fast or slow, passive or aggressive, visual or auditory, the concept of drone is a way out of the trap of narrative. It’s an approach that’s inspired by the concept of raga in Indian classical music, as expanded on in the philosophy and art of Pauline Oliveros: using music to “color the air,” set the tone, and deep listening to everything that’s sounding.
This is maybe more obvious with music like New Age, ambient, astral jazz, or classic drone and that’s a lot of what I play on the show and use for the mindfulness installations. But it’s also true for the “cosmic metal” that I love. It’s another inversion in terms of tone and tempo, ascent and descent, floating and sinking, sacred and profane. Wispy clouds in a blue sky to water dripping in a dank cave.
A lot of metal references rotting or decaying, processes that are often perceived as grotesque or disgusting. I went to see Cerebral Rot and Fetid – two death metal bands from the Pacific Northwest – at a bar in Cincinnati awhile ago. I was talking to a friend about how they sounded like what you see when you dig around under a fallen log in a damp forest, all the saprophytic organisms digesting the wood back into the soil.
He was like, “Oh yeah and also some insane troll screaming.”
But the sound of the dead tree and the fungi is all that I want to hear. I don’t need a troll to tell me it’s gnarly. Just let the growl be a growl, like a riff is just a riff. Please don’t tell me what it means. Didacticism is boring even when it’s blasphemous.
And then of course the lead singer of Cerebral Rot gets on the mic and gurgles “this next song is about tuuurds!” and the sweaty pit goes wild. People think metal is super serious and depressing and there is a lot of awful macho posturing but these shows can also be joyous and inclusive and ritualistically cathartic.
My use of metal on Inter-Dimensional Music, in mindfulness rituals, or as any part of my creative practice is a repurposing of the sound as a means of spiritual liberation, regardless of the artist’s intent. With that in mind, I do my best to avoid music that is racist, misogynistic, homophobic, fascist, or otherwise informed by toxic ideologies.
It’s all music that’s representing the vastness of the natural world, the dizzying chaos of the universe, addressing radical body acceptance, reveling in the flow of all of the body’s fluids, and giving sincere consideration to the universal nature of suffering. When you’re hearing it while spread out on a mat in a dark room, one can start to feel a death-affirming aesthetic very much like Yin yoga. It’s also a challenge to see if you can remain present over the course of a broadcast: Come for the late-night ragas and gentle aquarium sounds, stay for the heaviness of songs such as “Inherited Bowel Levitation - Reduced Without Any Effort” or “A Picture Of The Devouring Gloom Devouring The Spheres Of Being.”
Swale and Blossom, 2014, installation view
Yoga, meditation, music, visual art — they all come together in your multimedia events, such as “Lay Your Body Down” and “Basking in Gravity.” When did you begin to design and host these synergistic (and possibly synesthetic) group practice sessions? What was the initial inspiration? Based on your own experiences and/or those of your guests, have you found these enhanced sessions to be more effective than simple yoga or meditation by itself?
I had a show in Marfa in 2014 where I mounted canvases with lichens and cacti on walls covered in wallpaper that I created using complementary botanical patterns. That was my first attempt at something more immersive, but it didn’t work out how I wanted, partly because it was installed in a commercial gallery. The staff was patient, but they didn’t always want my broke dirtbag friends posting up and tripping out while tourists were shopping.
So I decided to make my own space. I broke into a small abandoned house next door to where I was living, and turned it into an installation/squat gallery project. I called it the South Plateau Adobe Ruin after the name of the street. The house had been empty for years, the roof had caved in and the lot was overgrown. I focused on the kitchen, removing trash, cleaning the floor and counters and hanging the same canvases from the gallery. I planted native ferns collected by a botanist friend in the sink and placed tequila bottle terrariums on the windowsills. I added poetry books, and a Westport chair. I came home one afternoon to find bone and concrete sculptures by Tyler Spurgin, a local chaos magician/artist, installed in the space.
South Plateau Adobe Ruin, 2015
South Plateau Adobe Ruin was open 24/7, with a flyer on the door that said “enter at your own risk, use an inside voice, and don’t disturb the wasps.” I’d wake up in the morning and the door would be hanging open or I’d find cigarette butts stubbed out on the floor and I’d know that somebody came by overnight and had a look around.
My visual art practice went to the back burner when I moved into the Indianapolis Zen Center in 2016. I started teaching yoga at IZC and leading meditation workshops at yoga studios. It was fun and I love my colleagues from that time, but “death affirmation yoga” with a New Age and drone metal soundtrack was sometimes a bit too esoteric for people who were looking for a good workout session.
I enjoyed teaching my donation-only classes at the Zen Center because I reached people who were intimidated by yoga studios. People of color, people with bigger bodies, queer folks, elders, and newbies who were uncomfortable walking into a bright room full of trim, flexible yogis who could afford to drop $20 on a class. I knew I was doing something right by the number of people who came to practice wearing jeans.
Workout yoga culture can be good! But the problems and contradictions that arise, even with the best intentions, from combining mindfulness practices with capitalism – cultural appropriation, body-shaming, creating a safe space for affluent white women at the expense of other marginalized communities – is a well documented. As an inflexible 200lb middle-aged dude that has found so much sanctuary in these practices, I get frustrated and sad when I see the radically-inclusive, non-hierarchical, anti-materialist aspects of yoga and Zen neutralized.
PlySpace Muncie (photo: Maxwell Denari)
When I got married and moved from the Indianapolis Zen Center to Muncie, Indiana, I combined many of these ideas into the Lay Your Body Down series. I collaborated with artist Karl Erickson – he was an art professor at Ball State University at the time – and local musician Mark Perretta, who was most recently on tour playing “skronk sax” with Sunburned Hand of the Man. PlySpace Muncie, an artist residency, let us use their gallery to stage the happenings.
The first Lay Your Body Down included Karl’s projections, Mark on long-form keyboard drones and tape loops, and my guided meditation and yoga instruction. It became an ongoing monthly series where we’d switch off between Karl’s “visual drones” and my botanical projections.
Since then I’ve created solo and collaborative installations at house galleries, yoga studios, and expansive DIY venues like Healer in Indianapolis or my East Coast base of operations, Magick City in Brooklyn. I did a super fun goat yoga version of Basking in Gravity at Penn Forest Natural Burial Ground in Pittsburgh during Migration 2018, a biannual underground metal festival. That was probably the heaviest one in terms of location.
Penn Forest Natural Burial Ground
In November 2019 we started a monthly series at Healer, this wildly psychedelic all-ages DIY art/music venue. It’s located in a derelict office park tucked away behind a trucking company compound on the southeast side of Indianapolis. The cubicles are still intact, but they’ve been turned into cozy shrines that you can explore on your own, some decked out as altars brimming over with strange configurations of plastic flowers, others stocked with dusty ‘70s electronics. There’s a little bar in the back, they have a booming soundsystem, and they host metal festivals, ambient showcases, dance parties, fire-eating demonstrations, all kinds of wild stuff.
Healer
I think my projects have attracted people who wouldn’t otherwise visit a dharma room or yoga studio. And it’s also important to clarify that zazen is not yoga, and yoga is not zazen, and that my installations are art experiences first and foremost.
I want to offer people enough information that they can head off in whatever direction they want. Drop by the IZC for real-deal sitting meditation practice, or listen to these dharma talks from Joko Beck. Visit my favorite yoga teachers in Muncie and Indianapolis. Here’s a list of metal bands informed by Buddhism and interstellar existentialism, or the names of the New Age and ambient artists doing the “pretty humming and water sounds” part of our session.
Mostly I just want to give people the opportunity to be in the room, in their bodies, for a couple hours.
Magick City
Do you have any ideas for refining or expanding your participatory experiences? Is there a next step or steps, or some still-unrealized vision?
I want to learn more about choreography and dance-based performance art. I’m newly curious about butoh, the slow, avant-garde Japanese dance style that works with darkness, death, and grotesque bodily forms. There’s certainly some overlap with death-affirming yoga there.
I’d like to get to a place where we can run through a practice session with minimal instruction, everyone in the room moving slowly through a sequence coordinated with a truly immersive, high volume soundtrack. Working with live musicians and other video artists reveals other interesting pathways.
I’m also looking for other places to practice, to take Basking in Gravity on tour. If you have access to a space with a level floor, and if you can connect with people who might be into super slow mildly uncomfortable yoga with very loud music and disorienting projections, drop me a line!
You can find Daniel on Instagram and Twitter, or contact him here. Merchandise for Basking in Gravity and Dead Bird Blues is available here.
ψ संघ