Teacher Teaching the Self

After the last three months of trying with great intention to soften and open and balance my practice to prepare the body for childbearing, and after three months of watching the perfectionistic tendencies of the ego tempt me out of soft places and back into hard, jaw-clenching efforts to hug muscle to bone...I am learning to teach myself as I would my students, to mother myself as I do my child. This has not been easy.

One of my sweet yoga friends sent this link to us this week:

http://www.iyogalife.com/ashtanga/

The text is a witty write-up about what Ashtanga is, what it asks of the body, and who is most likely to do it. One of the claims the text makes is that the practice seems most appealing to "anyone with three letters after their name, even if they’re OCD."

I have for a long time wondered whether Ashtanga lures a certain someone in, and I have written before about how the practice can be the perfect practice for the perfectionist, if she is willing to let it lure her and then crack her open.

I have three letters after my name — Ph.D. But I also have RYT after my name. The former title asks me to instruct students to think more; the latter asks me to instruct them to think less. And yet, in the university classroom, I emphasize freedom of mind — we think more so that we will have more choices. And, indeed, when I teach yoga, the perfectionist is nowhere to be found. My teaching is gentle, soft, insistent upon the release of ego. By the time my students are in Savasana, some are even asleep.

I am beginning to hear what I have been telling my students. And as the thousands of moments with my child have accumulated, I am ever so slowly learning to mother myself with a far gentler hand than I have experienced before. Forgiving, curious, kind, able to see the many facets of being and accept where they merge and collide.

This is all to say that the teaching and the doing and the thinking about the teaching and doing are beginning to unify. I am imagining a vast foggy field when all of these components come together in all of their mysteriousness and slowly approach one another like a kind of tribal circle of understanding. Their feet hover because the concept of turning one's teaching on oneself is so hard to anchor to the Earth.

It's slow. It's why we hear so much about how people don't change — the forces driving us to move quickly inhibit the slowness needed to hear what you're saying when you say it to others. I lovingly urge my students to meditate in each pose, to let the brain fall into the heart, to find Balasana if the flow become too intense, to modify when the body asks for it. I lovingly listen to my daughter's needs for water, sleep, food, comfort, conversation, a walk outside. But I have struggled to hear these words and turn them upon myself.

I am struggling less and less and less with that. And I am an Ashtangi.