Everybody knows yoga is about flexibility and now, going into my second straight year of practicing 4 to 5 times a week, I can turn my body into a few good pretzels. Yoga challenges my flexibility everyday. And everyday I rise to the challenge and give it my best shot. Until today.
Mr. Sleek body, easy going, gentle voice, slow moving instructor that almost made me leave in the middle of class on Tuesday, was back today. Now I had two choices. Get in the car and go back home. Or get in there, change my thinking, perceive this as a challenge, and get on with it. Anyone who knows me, knows I’d never back down from a personal challenge. Grabbing my gear, in I went. This time I did talk about him before class with my friend. She had the same experience as I did. He messed with her head, too. We both decided to take it as a challenge, instead of a gripe session. (I found it okay to discuss it, if I can keep it positive.)
Class started and proceeded much the same way I described it on Tuesday. The only yoga instructor I ever met with ADD. This time I decided he did know the dialogue, but chooses not to use it until he said whatever he wanted to, then he mumbles it quickly and still forgets to release us from the pose because he begins talking on an entirely different subject. All this in a quiet, super gentle, barely audible voice. Meanwhile everyone is in a different aspect of the pose and I’m staring out the window again. (The toilet bowl now has a huge skeleton head in the bowl and pumpkins on top – I left my phone home or I’d have a photo – maybe tomorrow).
So, if he was the same, how was I going to be? Therein is the rub – I am the only one that can change this for me because the only thing I can control is my response to his teaching. I once again have two choices – I can be miserable, mad, and leave with a bad feeling again….or….. I can be more FLEXIBLE – hear that? Flexible. Flexible in my head. Flexible in my thinking. Flexible in my responding. Nothing to do with twisting my body into a better pretzel.
I just told myself this was the way the class was going to be and I’d have to keep my mind within my own mat, within my own body, and instead of the meditative rhythmic movement state I so love each day, I will just have to stay alert, listen carefully, and wait quietly to get the medical benefits I came there for. Mmmm…turns out the medical benefits are not just for my body, as is so often true in this class.
God, grant me the serenity to change the things I can, change MY responses and reactions to the things I can’t, and the wisdom to realize the only person I can control is me. Yes, there is tremendous serenity in being flexible. Tremendous freedom, too, in knowing I am only bound by my own handcuffs, and I can release them whenever I so choose.
Lawrence Brown, professor of Humanities at Cape Cod Academy wrote something that stuck with me on the editorial page of last Friday’s Cape Cod times. I tore it out and kept it. And, here, today, I needed it. Now tell me if this isn’t yoga-minded – but nevertheless true:
“At the 1999 Parliament, I heard a scholar in Aramaic – the language Jesus spoke – offer us the Beatitudes in Aramaic, line by line. I was struck by one word: “I’makikhe,” to soften what is rigid within. If we try to do so, especially if we try with friends of different faiths, we tunnel under the dogma and learn to love each other.”
We all know that rigid things crack. And when a rigid thing cracks, sharp edges are exposed. We cut ourselves on these sharp edges. I am learning “I’makikhe”. I’m softening things within. Flexibility may be hard, but it hurts way less than the blood from the sharp edges. Tunneling under the dogma. Tunneling under who did what to whom – or how the class is taught – and finding the love, and/or peace, that hides underneath is an easier, more fulfilling way to live.
Today I was able to put aside what wasn’t important and focus on what was in the yoga studio. Doing that 5 days a week, for the rest of my life, creates deep changes in the way I respond and react to life outside the studio, too.
And so, as another day goes by, in the words of French author Anais Nin, many times “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”, and ….I have written.
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