Last Thursday I took an excellent online zoom yoga class from my friend and colleague, Christina Sell.
Christina and I share common tendencies and similarities in our teaching.
Christina is also very different from me, too, which is great because I already practice by myself and guide myself on a regular basis so it’s nice to have someone else sequence and put together a practice for me to follow.
Some of the ways I feel a shared alignment with Christina (did you get that I used “alignment” there without meaning anything about the body?… I crack myself up) are that we present material in very similar ways, we snort laughter out loud, we care deeply about our own relationships with yoga and movement, and we care deeply about those who share movement with us.
Christina and I are both life long learners. We’ve each studied many things and taught long enough to understand that we are presenting material and that those who choose to spend time practicing with us have self agency and should absolutely use it.
We are not the boss of you.
I’ll speak for myself, but I no longer have any interest whatsoever in a dogmatic approach to teaching yoga asana or any other type of movement.
I have a lot of knowledge about human movement, have invested a lot of money and time into high quality education, and I’ve spent a lot of time teaching and being a student. I have opinions mostly based on experience and a scientific understanding of biomechanics, what muscles do what and why, what plane you’re moving in, what happens along the biological aging curve, how to sequence and modify things for most people, etc.
I used to really like to have “rules” and so if you met those rules you were doing it “right” and that meant I was probably ok and “right”, so dogma worked for me for a long time.
I’ve outgrown that need and I am sorry that was ever a phase of my teaching and mentorship, but I’m also grateful that it was there and I had the chance to form a new relationship with “rules”.
I think I’ve spent some good time decluttering dogma, “shoulds”, how to be perfect, and how to follow arbitrary rules without questing whether they really are concepts that work for me today.
I’ve done that in a lot of categories of my life, but definitely in my own relationship to yoga asana and the way I present movement to those who choose to practice with me.
So back to my appreciation, ok?
I appreciate the exploration both Christina and I seem to be doing of moving away from dogmatic asana teaching, mostly I think as a natural process of simply being in the profession of teaching and practicing yoga for all these decades.
I’m also keenly aware that Christina and I have been taught by “giants whose shoulders we stand on” (direct quote from her class) and the things I’ve learned from those giants have and always will help inform my process of teaching, exploring, and doing.
One of the things I also appreciate about the classes I choose to take from Christina are that she teaches and does things that make me reach pretty f—ing deep in order to actually physically do them.
At some point in class last week as I was struggling to make this particular shape (see the video below) called “eka pada koundiyasana”, Christina said something fascinating and I’ve thought a lot about it. So much so, that I had to flesh it out as a rambling blog post.
She said, and I hope I’m not taking it out of context in any way, something that was such a brilliant observation of the obvious. “Have you ever noticed that Light on Yoga doesn’t include anything that Mr. Iyengar really couldn’t do?”
OK, so let’s take a “pause moment” while I have a mic drop.
Pause because I want to make it clear that this was not a derogatory comment regarding Mr. Iyengar.
We were in a part of class where we had performed an amazing amount of foundational movement sequencing to land at a really hard arm balance.
The statement was made during some talk about having different length torsos, appendages, body sizes, abilities, etc. In the context of, not everyone is going to look as “good” doing some of these things as others and we all probably have yoga poses or movements that we are really good at and other things that we struggle with and probably wouldn’t put in a big advertisement.
And clearly, if Christina or I published a book on asana we probably wouldn’t put much, if anything, in that book that we were really proficient at, right?
But for me, the comment about the things in Light on Yoga and Mr. Iyengar was sort of a revelatory mic drop moment.
I think the meaning in this whole enchilada of the tale I’m telling is that we often see in books from the “giants” like Mr. Iyengar, or the teachers we choose to practice with, or posts on IG, some sort of picture of what we may consider “perfect”.
It’s so vitally important to also recognize that what we do on the yoga mat is practice.
Practice not perfection. Period.
And hopefully what we learn about ourselves on the mat and the skills me develop (many of them having nothing to do with being able to bend more or put a limb in a certain position) can then be utilized in all our actions and interactions off the mat.
With ourselves and with others.
I love it when those of us highly regarded in our movement professions can show our imperfections, our oopsie daisy moments, and teach ourselves and others that we are not looking to achieve “perfection” or even “optimal”.
There was a question during Christina’s class about the most “optimal” way to do a certain pose and I’ve got a lot to say about “optimal”, but I’ll save that for another day. Credit to Christina for handling that question beautifully, by the way.
And maybe those of us highly regarded in our movement professions should more often show how difficult something is for us to achieve, to share more openly about our humanness, our aging process, what may be getting more difficult for us. This in itself is a practice, this being human.
This is probably why you hear me and Christina snort laughter so much in our classes. We have learned to be better friends with our humanness and maybe not take ourselves so damn seriously.
I know this is what I want in a teacher. It’s what I want to be as a teacher. I want you to know that I struggle on and off the mat, but I keep showing up to explore, learn, accept, and practice.
Ultimately I want to share myself and my practice with you, not some ideal of perfect.
