Yogic Gifts for Hectic Lives
While cycling in a bit of a hurry to arrive early to teach a yoga class, I caught myself feeling a bit guilty for being in a hurry, and decided to use this personal experience as an opener for the class. I spoke of the self-imposed but unnecessary guilt we sometimes feel whenever we hurry to get to a yoga class, or when we are a few minutes late. Although there’s no pre-yoga class composure we must don, it is common to chastise ourselves for being in a hurry to get to yoga class, as if being in a hurry for yoga class was sacrilegious. My suggestion to the class was for us all to take a step back from our self-criticisms for hurrying, and choose to see going to yoga class as giving ourselves a gift and, quite possibly, giving others the greater or lesser rippling effect of this gift when, post-yoga, we relate and interact with others with more equanimity and warmth.
As I reflected and broadened on this topic after class, my mind went back to my first day of yoga teacher training when a fellow student asked what we should expect from yoga teachers as citizens in our community. She went on to tell us that she saw a yoga teacher in a park yelling at her dog, pulling hard on its leash, and munching down on a Big Mac. We all laughed and there was general agreement that this was not proper behavior for a yoga teacher, and seeming agreement that there are some higher standard of citizenship that yoga teachers should uphold.
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Rounding out the perspective, our teacher pointed out that maybe the yoga teacher in question was having a bad day, and we don’t really know what is going on for a person unless we talk to the person. The bottom line was that it did not look good for the yelling, dog pulling, and rotten-Ronny-consuming yoga teacher. I wished we could have come back to that first day’s question on our last day of class, to see how our perspectives might have changed.
Since Big Macs and yoga teachers exist in the same world, another gift yoga can give us is the ability “to join” or “to yoke,” seemingly incongruent experiences in our repertoire and choice of perspectives. From an embracing non-dualistic standpoint, it is possible to be in a hurry and be going to a yoga class. It is possible for a yoga teacher to wrench on her dog’s leash, eat a common burger, and also be a good yoga teacher.
Sarah Jean Bradley
B.A., B.C. Teach. Cert., CELTA, CMHW, RYT
B.A., B.C. Teach. Cert., CELTA, CMHW, RYT