Sarah Court

After extensive market research (read: I emailed some fellow teachers), my suspicions have been confirmed that many people think yoga teachers are at least one, if not all, of the following:

a)     Insanely flexible

b)    Entirely without worldly interests

c)     A replacement for their parents/husband/girlfriend

d)    Actually God

Said people are thus either hugely shocked or completely put out upon discovering that one or all of these things may not be true.

So let’s take a little time here and discuss, shall we?

 

a) If you teach yoga, you must be insanely flexible OR I can’t do yoga, because I’m not flexible.

Certainly, some people can put their feet behind their head. Yours truly can, on a good day and an empty stomach. But I know an excellent teacher in New York who has a metal rod holding her spine together, which limits certain poses from happening on her body. When I went in for hip surgery two years ago, I had no idea of what my practice would look like afterwards. I heard tons of stories of ‘impaired’ teachers: blind, in a wheelchair, and so on. The bottom line is that teachers are also students, and as such we too are on a journey with our bodies, our minds and our souls. We are all working at our own razor’s edge, playing at that point where we’re challenged, and that challenge is going to be different for each of us. But what matters most in any practice is that we are consistently dancing on that edge.

One of my first yoga teachers, David Life, told a great story about taking a private lesson with the late, great Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. He described it as 3 hours of sweating, body-twisting, ego-driven effort to impress his teacher with his abilities, which left him collapsed in a puddle on the floor. Pattabhi Jois simply looked down at his sweaty, exhausted student and said, “You’re doing it wrong.”

There are arenas for pure physical accomplishment, but yoga isn’t one of them. What matters in yoga, for students and teachers alike, is the attitude we bring. What keeps you going to a certain class? Are you trying to impress a teacher, or another student? Are you only impressed with a teacher because of what they can do with their body (or what that body looks like)? Or can you find your private space while tapping into that group energy and come to your razor’s edge, as it varies from day to day, and allow your teacher to do the same?

 

b) If you teach yoga, you live a lifestyle that is free of worldly interests (preferably in a cave, on a mountainside, eating gruel).

As one of my polled teachers said, “I don't see why any interests I have, have to be mutually exclusive - it’s ALL yoga!!”

Indeed it is. Some students enjoy that we are humans, with human desires, interests and passions that extend beyond the practice of yoga. For other students, this somehow becomes a traitorous act: our sole purpose is to represent a pious lifestyle that reflects a pious soul. But we are neither monks nor nuns; and as I have found with my own teachers, when I project some sort of expectation onto another human being, more often than not I will end up disappointed. My projection says more about me than it does the other person.

What makes an act, a practice, and a lifestyle yogic is not its content; rather, it is the manner in which that act or practice is done. We’ve already seen how yoga without correct attitude is gymnastics; conversely, “non-yogic” activities can take on that yogic quality of witnessing and awareness and thus be transformed into a yogic practice.  With a focus on staying present and in the moment, gardening can be yogic, as can drinking coffee, pole-dancing, headbanging, or having sex.

Another teacher reminded me of the quote from Swami Satchidananda: “a yogi in any job, even a butcher, is better than a non-yogi.”

 

c) My yoga teacher is my new boyfriend/girlfriend/mom/dad.

I want to be extremely clear here: our work as yoga teachers takes us into many realms of relationship with our students, as a means of assisting their deepening self-knowledge and self-awareness. Because of this, sometimes the work we do will resemble that of a psychotherapist, or a confidant, or a physical therapist. We will inevitably develop relationships with students that we work with for a long time. This is not inappropriate: in fact, quite the opposite, as we are then able to support our students’ growth, remind them of their progress, and adjust our teaching to continue their development.

But while we are doing all of these things, we are at work. Although we might also develop an attachment to you, aiding you in your progress is our job. Healthy boundaries on both sides are appropriate and necessary so we can continue to do our best. Please do not tell us in front of a whole classroom of people that you are in love with us (true story), because not only is it extremely uncomfortable, chances are you really aren’t. When someone helps you get out of pain, it can be easy to ascribe that relief as coming from the other person. It might follow in your mind that this person understands you better than the disappointments that are your family or partner. You feel that they’re made for you.

The thing is though, you probably don’t really know them that well. You see them every week in class, and that repetition creates a familiarity. Maybe they even tell stories from their own life to illustrate a teaching, and to generate a relaxed classroom setting. Sometimes they put their hands on your body, which has a certain intimacy to it and should be done with care (but that’s a whole separate blog post).

There are specific instances of teachers and students falling in love, but they are the exception, not the norm, and the feelings in these exceptions have always gone both ways.

On the whole, we can be your friend, or shoulder to cry on, and we do want you to feel that you can open up to us and ask questions, or talk about challenges you’re having. But expecting more than the kind of relationship you would have with any teacher or therapist will set you up for disillusionment upon discovering d) below.

 

d) My yoga teacher is so spiritual, I think they’re actually God.

Sharon Gannon used to talk about this all the time and debunk the ‘spiritual’ label. She’d talk about how ridiculous it is to claim that one person is more spiritual than any other. “Are we not all spiritual beings,” she’d say, “because we are animated by spirit?”

Yoga teachers may be spending more time than other people studying the body-mind-spirit continuum, practicing asana, meditating and the like. But we are also people. We get angry, we swear, we make mistakes, we screw up. We get distracted. We rear-end you while driving (my bad). We forget things. We say things we don’t mean.

If we set up our teacher to be beyond the sway of human emotions, it is only going to be a disappointment if we see them yelling at somebody. If we think that just because they spend their class time drawing upon the greatest wisdom available to them, that there’s never a moment when they’re unwise, then we are the fools. We are all, teachers and students alike, doing our best in every moment, whether or not it’s the absolute best that could be done. If we’re working on bringing more compassion into our lives, wouldn’t a good place to start be with our teachers?

 

The bottom line is, folks, we’re people too. We’re working on ourselves just like you are. We may have been doing it a little longer, but we’re still on that same path as everyone else. Recognize that we are not in some separate category, but that we’re in many ways just like you.  And then reach out for our hand and let us do what we do best.

Someone asked me once what I thought my biggest character flaw was. I replied that it was the fact that I was completely perfect, as this tended to make other people feel bad about themselves…

In reality, one of the things I find most challenging is patience, and I think this is a common issue for many of us. Whether it’s being stuck behind a slow driver (yes, this is an L.A. issue I now deal with!), or waiting to hear if we got the job, or wondering if we passed a test, or even when we get into the mindset of ‘next year, when a, b and c have happened, life will be better’, patience can be a challenge. Impatience is a mild, somewhat acceptable form of anger, and used correctly it can motivate us to take charge and make positive changes in our lives and for the world around us. But when every little thing starts to get on your nerves, when you find yourself sighing with exasperation at the large crowd of tourists walking slowly in front of you, or the older lady having a conversation with the check-out person instead of moving out of your way, or if the waiter doesn’t bring your water quickly enough, it might be a sign that something is out of whack.

It seems to me that patience and control go together, or rather, impatience is born out of a perceived lack of control of a situation. The world around us is behaving in a manner that we don’t appreciate, that we could do better at, and we simultaneously strengthen our own attachment to our righteous indignation and separate ourselves even further from those around us (“Doesn’t this person see that I’m WAITING?”).  We confirm our already well-established beliefs that we are right, and everyone else is wrong, and each time something happens to test our patience, we confirm it again.

It makes our minds harden. It makes our bodies harden. And it hardens our hearts. If, as my dear friend and gurubai Vidya likes to remind me, 90% of what other people say and do has nothing to do with us, then we need to stop taking it all so personally. That person may be walking slowly in front of you because they can’t go any faster. The waiter who forgets your bread may be dealing with a terrible boss, and is just trying to get through the shift without quitting. The old woman striking up a conversation with the bank teller may be enjoying the only personal contact she’s going to have all day. We’ve become such an accelerated society, used to getting everything that we want right now, that we actually believe that 5 minutes later is not good enough.

Everyone around us, in every moment of every day, is doing the best that they can in that moment. Perhaps, because you are so perfect (;-)), you could do a better job. But I can pretty much guarantee that at some point or another, we have all been the perceived cause of someone else’s impatience, perhaps when we drove down a street too slowly because we didn’t know where we were (again, me in L.A.).

So that can become our practice: when we find impatience rising in ourselves, we can remind ourselves that this person, this group, this situation is evolving and happening to the best of its abilities. It reminds us that everyone else is not just a bit player in the movie called My Life, but that we are all sharing this planet, this sidewalk, this restaurant, these great gifts, together.

 

sribhagavan uvaca:

asamsayam mahabaho

mano durnigraham calam

abhyasena tu kaunteya

vairagyena ca grhyate

 

The Blessed Lord spoke:

Without doubt, O Arjuna,

The mind is unsteady and difficult to restrain;

But by practice, Arjuna,

And by indifference to worldly objects,

It is restrained.

 

Bhagavad-Gita VI.35

(translation by Winthrop Sargeant)

 

The other day I had a phone conversation that I can only describe as disturbing. Without going into the details, it left me feeling unhappy, angry, and doubting myself for a few days (it was a terrible conversation!). I was completely pulled off-center, or off the point.

My teacher Manorama talks about staying on the point all the time: for yoga, it’s the whole point! (ha ha, I’ll be here all week, please tip your waitress). Staying on the point is a vast topic that we could discuss until the end of time, but in essence to me it means staying with the truth of our highest Self, staying connected to the pulsation that is Life, staying with the One that we all are, even as life bounces us around.

So here’s what I’ve been playing around with in my mind ever since the phone call: does staying on the point mean divorcing ourselves from our experiences? Are we supposed to be walking around bracing ourselves against any encounters that might interfere with our natural serenity (Remember that Seinfeld episode? – “SERENITY NOW!!”) and as a result end up disconnected from the world around us? Is the only place for a yogi to maintain that serenity a deep dark cave in the side of a mountain? Should we all stop what we’re doing and go there right now?

When we get disturbed, we are experiencing a kind of resistance to the reality of what is going on in a particular situation. We are disturbed by it, quite often, because it seems like something that is out of our control. Another person expressing anger at us, the passing of a loved one, our feelings or ego getting hurt, none of these things are included in our idea of how life should be. We resist them, and we suffer.

I took a class with a great teacher a few days ago, Eddie Marashian (look him up if you come to LA), and he told a story of a puppy he had as a child. When the puppy was taken to the vet to get its shots, it struggled so violently as it was being held down that it actually injured itself and died.  And truly, resistance builds up in the body as tension, as illness, as injury, as chronic pain. I don’t think the person I had the phone conversation with was in any way disturbed by it, and yet I walked around for a few days feeling terrible in body and mind.

So what do we do? We do our best to stay on the point, but here’s my point: staying on the point is not about being rigidly attached to an idea that the world is supposed to be flowers and rainbows and singing animals all the time. It’s not about becoming a hermit and avoiding any interactions with the world around us in an attempt to preserve some sort of serenity. That’s not real serenity anyway, if it’s so fragile that it cannot be challenged. The world challenges us every day, and it still would even if we were hiding in a cave.

Had I been able to stay on the point during this conversation, I would have found a way to create some kind of compassion for this fellow human being who was simply doing his best in the moment. When we practice living like this, we get to use the experiences of our lives as learning tools. We may find that compassion in the moment or upon later reflection (as I eventually did, with much help from the wise people around me), but either way we get to use our experiences to stay on the point.

 

YS  II.33 vitarka badhane pratipaksa bhavanam

When disturbed by negative thoughts, opposite ones should be thought of.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

[Side note about the sutra: this doesn’t mean if something bothers you, pretend it’s not happening and think about flowers and rainbows and singing animals! It means find another way to see the situation and experience the moment. See if in that moment of anger/upset/frustration/whatever you can flip it around and find another perspective.]