Pool Cue

Sometimes I feel like I don't have a thought in my head.

Yoga Chronicles: A Teacher's Notes

A while back, Ruthie Streiter began her class at Jaya Yoga Center by saying she’d been on the phone with a friend the other night, talking about what it took to be a good yoga teacher.

I liked this right away. It was a pleasant reminder that there are people trying to be good yoga teachers just the way I am trying to be a good yoga student. I felt in that moment all of us in the class had a common cause.

Unfolding a piece of paper, Ruthie read out a list of four key tasks for the instructor.

Sitting on my mat, I half listened and half began working feverishly to concoct an acronym by which to remember the four items. Later, of course, I could recall the acronym, but not what it stood for.

I emailed Ruthie, and she was kind enough to send me the list, which she said should be sourced to her friend, Kimberly Johnson. Here it is, partially (but I hope responsibly) paraphrased:

The Four Key Tasks for a Yoga Instructor

Instructors should help students to:

1. Connect to the breath.

2. Visualize. Visualization helps students to focus, sharpen observation skills, tap into creativity, learn how to use imagination to create and move energy and feeling, and awaken the inner senses.

3. Understand that there is constant change—or, in other words, to grasp the inevitable truth of impermanence. If we know that things are changing all the time, then we won’t cling or grasp as much; it’s easier to let go.

At the same time, teachers should:

4. Hold a higher vision for students even when the students don't or when it is difficult for them to keep it in perspective.

* * *

I’m not a teacher, but it occurred to me that this list might contain useful ground rules for any kind of instruction.

The ideas about breath and impermanence (1 and 3), for instance, are among the core teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and obviously these have wide applicability.

It seemed to me there was a lot to chew on in point number 4.

I'm sometimes envious of yoga teachers and therapists—who often promote enormous personal progress in the people they work with, but in ways that rarely leave their student clients feeling judged or criticized.

(It may sometimes help that students may as yet have no clue whatsoever about the ideal they are shooting for—it may take years even to know how far we are falling short!)

In both fields, I suspect, the pace of the project depends largely on the motivation of the student. What this means for the guides, I imagine, is that faithful adherence to a higher vision may require a great deal of patience.

Is there some way to integrate gentleness with higher vision if you’re in a field in which you must apply specific standards or there is some period of time in which the student must show improvement?

What if you’re a teacher who has to give a grade? Or an editor who feels the piece won’t be publishable if you don’t overhaul a sentence?

I don’t know the answers, but I’m no longer thinking about the question in quite the same way.

Above all, it was the point about visualization that hit home for me.

I’ve read about athletes envisioning a brilliant performance before the big competition, but I’d never played sports or thought that was something I could do.

As for visualizing where I wanted to be in five years, or imagining what kind of tree I might like to be, forget it.

It is very different, somehow, to be asked to behave like a tree.

If somebody asks me to stand like a gnarled old oak, I’ll give it the old college try. And if someone asks me to move like a willow, I’ll do something entirely different—especially if my eyes are closed and nobody’s looking.

This kind of visualization (through enactment, in many instances) is going on in yoga all the time. The English names for some asanas, like plank or corpse pose, already contain images.

It’s not unusual to be asked to imagine your heart as a flower or to breathe like a jellyfish or to think about grass blowing in the wind or the waves on the shore.

Much to surprise, I find myself actually building these images, experiencing them, somehow feeling that I can live them in my body.

It does feel like an act of creation—a path forged by metaphor, or simile, or analogy, or whatever it is. One begins to embody so many different things.

When she came to visit, my friend L. remarked that she’d never written so much fiction as when she was regularly taking yoga. Focus, observation, creativity, imagination, moving energy and feeling, awakened senses—it makes sense to me.

Yoga Chronicles: Spring Training

“How can you think and hit at the same time?” —Yogi Berra

* * *

“Do you want to know a secret?”

So asked C., the yoga instructor, staring down at a student. The student agreeably said yes. C.’s secret, delivered to the room, was that the basic techniques we practiced over and over were going to make the advanced stuff easier: they were the foundation.

I’m nowhere near command of even the fundamentals, but I had a flashing sensation of what a baseball player may feel in spring training—the pleasure of doing drills, fielding hundreds of ground balls, making the throw, over and over, until he knows in every cell of his being that he can make that play.

I’ve never played an organized sport, or even tried to master a disorganized one, but I was reminded of what my friend L. had said, long ago, about being a catcher.

There came a moment in the game when her body simply did all that she had trained it to do—automatically, without thinking—and it felt like joy. This was the first time I’d had any inkling of how you might get to that.

Barefoot and Posing

I’m an absolute beginner in yoga.

I’m a beginner in Buddhism, too, but at least my dalliance with Buddhism has gone on for a long time.

Even if I’ve never seriously meditated I’ve read books by people who do. I’ve contemplated a lot of their philosophy and to some extent begun trying to live by it.

I do have a sustained practice in the form of therapy. I watch my thoughts, but I also say them out loud to someone who has taught me what it might mean to live the questions (as she pointed out that Rilke said) and shown me by her own actions what openness and compassion can look like.

Over years of talking, things happen—the thoughts shift, they lose their substance, one’s ways of responding to the world become a little less fixed. That may be similar to what happens with meditation.

For me, anyway, the Buddhism and the therapy have been complementary. Buddhism taught me I could sit still and bear the miserable thoughts and feelings that were coming up in therapy.

Therapy gradually taught me that many of the thoughts I was most convinced were true were little more than a barrier against any experience of life I didn’t think I’d be able to manage.

At this point, I’m pretty much an absolute beginner in life.

Although in some ways I feel like a very physical person, all my training has been to lead with my mind. I’m sure that if you spent years on the cushion Buddhism would be a physical practice, but it’s less so if you read a book and then go sit for 15 minutes every now and again.

I’ve dabbled in yoga for years, too, without treating it as much more than a source of calm and exercise. It seemed too religious to get into at any depth, I suppose. My favorite parts were the various forms of lying down and then the deep rest at the end.

I wandered into the local yoga center to meditate, feeling guilty that I came so often for free, but resisting the invitation take classes at a place that I’d remembered visiting years before and finding too strenuous.

Eventually, though, something clicked. C. said, “You should come practice with us,” and I heard the word practice.

Practice. I could take my emotion practice and my watch-my-mind practice and toss in a body practice and see how they all came together.

Fireworks, is how.

Relatively speaking, I don’t think the classes are all that hard. Still, for me in the early weeks the physical effort was so overwhelming it was as if I’d lost touch with my mind entirely.

I went back to the time when I was ambidextrous, and I couldn’t tell right from left. I heard the words but I had no idea how to translate them into what to do.

I felt about five years old, disoriented and vulnerable—but this time trying not to worry about it.

With my thinking disabled, I had none of my usual defenses. Once at the end of class, I almost started to cry. There were moments of grief. I had tiny moments of feeling I could play. Sometimes I walked home nearly floating on my own sense of sunniness.

I had to go into therapy and talk about it all.

I suspect I was a little bit unnerved, because in the early weeks it seemed like I kept coming close to various kinds of accidents. I nearly crashed my bike. I practically set my house on fire.

I had this idea that I was trying to injure myself so I could get out of it.

Then I started to enjoy getting stronger. I’ve had tiny inklings of what it might mean to relax while feeling you were doing something that was way beyond your physical capacity.

I’m learning to visualize.

Some days I can almost balance. The next day, it’s hopeless.

The whole experience reminds me of learning to drive a car. The first time I ever tried to change lanes at 55 miles an hour was on Route 17.

Keep foot on the gas, look, signal, check the mirrors, steer, and not panic my father? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could put together the dozen things one had do get from one side of the road to the other in the tiny space of time allotted.

Once I stepped blithely into a lunge and now I’m only halfway through my checklist of body parts by the time the time the pose is over.

Still, I haven’t quit. Yet.

I’ve always done yoga with my eyes closed. I loved that that was an option—it helped me to black out my own self-consciousness.

I liked yoga the way I like swimming—you’re doing something in close proximity with other people, but you can pretend they’re not there.

It’s not like that this time. My eyes are still closed, but it’s not just because I’m shutting the other people out.

Somehow, this feels like a community. I really like the people, both the teachers and the students. There’s laughter. The classes are often a great deal of fun.

All of this is a whopping five months old.

I can see already that there’s a way to do yoga what would require a serious commitment. I bet you don’t really know anything for years and years.

It’s probably not for me.

Still, I’m intrigued. I’ve just started reading B.K.S. Iyengar. I like how many images there are when people talk about yoga. I like a spiritual approach that gives the body its due.

I found myself thinking I should keep my own yoga journal, because I can imagine myself being continually fascinated by experiences and ideas.

If everything that occurs to me now seems impossibly stupid a month from now, oh well. If perchance I stick with it, it might be interesting to see what I learned along the way.

Or not.

Okay, I’ve had the thought. Now let it go.

Filing Cabinet: Iyengar: The Breath Is a Horse

“The breath must be enticed or cajoled, like catching a horse in a field, not by chasing after it, but by standing still with an apple in one’s hand."

—B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 12.

I’ve been puzzling over this quote all week, as if it were some kind of koan. I’ve never thought of my breath as a wild horse.

In meditation, I think of the breath as the thing I am supposed to turn my attention to rather than getting swept up in my thoughts.

I know the breath is essential, and perhaps it is the closest we get to the infinite, but maybe I think it is boring.

It seems much livelier in my head. Historically, the thoughts I've watched have shot around like bullets in a firefight. Now, as I sit more, they sometimes slow to an orderly march, like items on a news ticker.

When I finally move away from them, I imagine, the breath is just going to be there.

But it’s not? I’m supposed to be standing in the middle of a field, holding an apple? It’s actually skittish and willful? I have to woo it?

Somehow, this changes everything.

Back to the Breath

Yoga notes: The other day T., one of the instructors, said something like: “Pay attention to your breath. It’s as close as we can get to the infinite in this life.”

Later: “You need the body to breathe. So in focusing on the breath you are focusing on the body.”

In whatever primitive state of “spiritual” evolution I may be, I like this. I like the infinite in this life. I like this body, which has to open up and let it all in.

I’ve had occasion to be grateful for respirators.

Scentient Being

C., the yoga instructor, proposed that each of us imagine our heart as a flower. “What does it smell like?” she asked.

A peony, in my case.

I love peonies—as I child, I associated their blooming with my birthday, although that rarely seems to happen anymore.

C. remembered that the pink peonies of her youth were crawling with red ants. According to Wikipedia, this is because the buds of peonies are covered with nectar.

In early Japan, Wikipedia adds, the Japanese word for peony occasionally referred to wild boar. Why? Because straying Buddhists used flower names as code when they went looking the meats they were forbidden to consume.

The Japanese have also been known to arrange the pink slices of boar’s meat in peony patterns.

This seems almost a Buddhist lesson in itself. Something like: don’t get attached to the idea that anybody’s perfect.