As we enter the last 25 hours of our 200-hour yoga certification, I can say it is probably one of the hardest voluntary experiences I've undertaken in quite sometime (although still a far, far cry from almost being eaten by bears at Wheaton).
A few weeks ago, we had to sequence a lesson using the nearly 500-page book of poses we'd been working from. The list of requirements was extensive. Still, it didn't seem that hard until I considered that the primary goal should be to leave the practitioner feeling really good; or, failing that, at least not injure them.
I recruited Cara and her daughter Aubrey for my students. All was going according to plan until I got a series of break-up texts mere seconds before I was due to teach. I literally cried my way through the entire introduction, like a lunatic. And since Cara and Aubrey are empaths, they cried too...while it was being filmed...to hand in as evidence of my great progress as a yogi.
It might not have been so bad, but then the OCD part of my brain that always feels it has to "confess" my failures caused me to blurt out an explanation for my "wet" instruction to the teachers and my entire yoga class the next time we met. It was around that time that Yoga Elsa told us she would mostly just be looking at our introductions. So at least she got an interesting "here's how yoga relates to Life" for mine, hopefully. To be honest, I really don't know for sure because I refused to watch it and relive the experience before handing it in.
Our most recent weekend of training involved meeting with a spiritual leader and Sanskrit scholar to study the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. "Sutras" means "sutures" and the yoga sutras are the teachings which, all stitched or sutured together, form the basis of yogic philosophy. We spent most of the weekend reading, annotating, and meditating on the yoga sutras. (I sent one of the words to Priya, who's been back in India most of the summer, to make sure I was understanding it correctly you know, before I had it tattooed onto my arm or something. She asked all the Bangalore aunties and uncles, and they reached a consensus and texted me back. Apparently Sanskrit and Hindi are still pretty closely bound.)
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It was very hard for me to stay focused on the spiritual leader via Zoom. Also, I was a little afraid of her. What if she was also a mindreader? Therapy Elsa tried to convince me that no one is a mindreader, but I had heard tales of the guru's formidable powers of insight and remained nervous. What if she probed my brain through the medium of my MacBook screen? I felt that spiritual people were not to be trusted, and anything was possible.
I was extremely thankful that someone had warned me the guru might call upon me to say what I'd learned at the end. After watching her sternness with one of my friends during a session, I became even MORE wary of saying the wrong thing or not having learned enough. What if I brought probing questions upon myself and/or began confessing more inappropriate things as a result!?
I guess this fear propelled me to preemptively confess things. When she got to my Zoom square, I blurted out, "When you asked us to write down all our myriad identities -- teacher, sister, friend -- I noticed that a lot of mine were negative." PlzDoNotAskMeToListThemPlzDoNotAskMeToListThemPlzDoNotAskMeTo--"I want to learn to trust my own instincts. I'm not very good at that right now."
"Interesting. It's pretty hard to trust someone who's always saying mean things to you," she observed.
"I guess."
"You need to speak kindly to yourself, so that you can learn to trust yourself. Talk to yourself gently and focus on your good identities."
I didn't start thinking for myself until pretty recently. Frankly, it was terrifying for the first few years and required a lot of medication. It didn't seem like I should get to question my "elders" or the old white men running the churches. Honestly, I couldn't even figure out what to have opinions about at first. I used to yell at Therapy Elsa every time she tried to make me have an opinion because I legit did not know how to.
Even now, I try to form opinions but second-guess myself so much that I constantly have to forward work emails to my Tribe or screenshot texts to ask someone else what they think the sender meant. It's exhausting.
I'm reading this Jordan B. Peterson book right now called "12 Rules for Life" and it's really, really good (srsly, it's on these Top 10 Books to Change Your Life lists and whatnot; also, he's got a podcast if that's more your style). Anyway, one of the rules is, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today," and that really hit home. The Elle of today may not be an All-Star. But she's a hell of a lot more balanced and insightful than the woman who first saw a doctor at 27 under duress. Or the woman who first called Therapy Elsa on a Facebook friend's recommendation. Or the person who began yoga teacher training 6 months ago.
So, you know. That's not nothing.
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