After yoga class, I'll have a latte

This morning I had an…er …text from a friend who attended my class earlier. She had a lot going on in her life and for the 75 minutes she devoted to herself, it would seem that that would have helped her unload a lot of grief, stress, tension. And for that block of time, she might have. However, in this particular text she was ranting about the traffic, and the inconvenience of having locked herself out of her house, of her children’s screaming demands, of the weight and entirety of the day that unfolded before her. I quipped, “a lot of good the yoga the did.” We joke like that. “Well,” she wrote back, “you should have seen me b4 the yoga.”

Which of course got me thinking about yoga and it’s residual effects on the rest of our day. We take class, and work hard to incorporate the instructions, we will our breath to make it’s magic and introduce us to a new place, a deeper place a more patient, more resilient more consistent place inside of us. Only to fold up the mat, walk out the door to a rushed latte and a back log of missed calls – and did we really change anything about the way we might choose to move in the world that day?

Is it too high of an expectation to think that 75 minutes practicing to breathe a little better, stretch out some tighter places within us, might actually help soften the side of us that so easily unravels at the lost car keys, the wrong directions, the litany of daily pressures that may present themselves, one after the other? As a student, there are many times I come to class and leave a completely different person. My body feels looser. My mind for a nano-second might even feel clearer and there is a lingering moment where this clarity grabs hold of me and my awareness kicks in and I can take the short walk from the studio to the car, like a 3 year old might (minus the tantrum) and take my time noticing things like leaves rustling, or cars whooshing by, or rain falling and actually liking it.

How long does it last? At what point does that spaciousness get swallowed up by all life’s frustrations big or small? I suppose the lifespan of that feeling fluctuates. Even in the midst of my yoga practice, I grapple with how I want poses to feel, versus how they might actually feel that day. I work sometimes tirelessly to re-direct my focus to the task at hand – my body, my breath, a specific instruction instead of the ten million other things that start mentally cramp my space. The practice itself is filled with moments of deep contemplation, and straining overexertion – of triumph and of vulnerability. Of calm acceptance and over-reactiveness.

As a teacher, I always have this urge to encapsulate that post yoga feeling for my students. To help my students feel so weighed down by the bliss of their own experience that nothing about their day would rattle them. That the work they have done, the focus they have chosen to cultivate would somehow create a force field of protection against an easy tendency to break down or fall apart.

But then I recognize how unreasonable I am being. Yoga is not a cure for our bad days. It is not a magic spell we cast and become immune from our own little tantrums. If we keep placing those expectations on our yoga practice, then we have removed the very source of who is creating the behaviors and making our choices in the first place.

I DON'T DO YOUR YOGA

The other day I was sitting at the pool at my parent’s East Norwalk apartment and was talking to a woman about, what else, yoga. I was... er pigeon-holed into the subject matter as soon as her mother swam toward me and said, “Oh, you are the yoga lady.”

Truly, I am always happily surprised when people have heard about our yoga studio.

Her daughter, about my age, talked openly about all the great things she heard about the studio but then said, “I don’t do your yoga. I do Bikram.” She almost sounded apologetic.

Of course my immediate reaction is always a little defensive. (Immediate reactions I suppose have a history of hurting and not helping situations). Luckily, my defensiveness was concealed and I was able to affirm her preference for “her” yoga by saying my stock response which speaks to the tune of, “whatever helps you to connect to a fuller, healthier life is good yoga.” This piqued her interest, not that I was earnestly trying to sell her on “my” yoga. And while this may have been my own version of subliminal SYJ advertising, I was being completely sincere. I truly believe that if your yoga practice makes you feel good in your life, makes you see and experience your relationships with a deeper and richer perspective, makes your body feel strong and healthy and pain free, then it’s a good working yoga. It’s natural for us to spend our energy defending and protecting our practice, our systems of choice. We covet the deep experience our yoga teachers and yoga studios create for us. We want everyone we know to get what we get. Mitchel often says, “you are a yogi hidden in plain sight.” Yoga is not a messianic world. You are not yoga’s messenger or yoga’s evangelist nor should you care to convert others close to you to do your yoga. Just be yourself, and let other’s be themselves and you will be doing your yoga a great justice.
.