In my early yoga years I looked up to everyone. The guys with a strength and stamina that intimidating me massively, the flexible girls who effortlessly folded in half or wiggled an ankle behind the neck, the energetic asana teachers who led a packed room through a sweaty sequence, the imperturbable meditation teachers who quietly asked nothing everything of me. I wondered which type I might come to associate myself with as I ‘grew up’ in my yoga practice.
I’m still wondering that. What kind of yogi do I want to be? Or rather, what kind of human being do I want to be and what yoga practices would support that?
As I make my way along my yoga path, of course I’m becoming more discerning in who I heroise or to what degree I admire them. It’s a curious evolution, seeing how my viewpoint changes, what I once thought was beyond reach for me has now become the everyday, some of what I thought was ‘real yoga’ (ha ha!) interests me less, as well as a host of skills and attributes that I’d never considered previously have now become my focus. Everything changes.
I’ve recently started attending a handstand training class. There’s a lot of partner work as we go through various drills and techniques. Last week I was paired with one of my old yoga heroes, a long term student I always thought had a nice asana practice. He’s astanga trained and his vinyasa/flow yoga practice looked a cut above the usual to me. He has strength and awareness and a certain measured grace. I used to want to practise alongside him, for the quiet concentration vibe he gave off that kept me steady through years when my yoga mat was a place of massive uncertainty. I was grateful to him for being there quietly doing his thing alongside those dramatic practices of mine, as I started to work through a whole bunch of emotional stuff with a body that was totally unprepared to be the container for such turmoil and ugly soul-searching.
So how was it when we partnered up for handstand practice? Well with my teacherly dispassion thing going on now, I wasn’t really so bothered. It was just someone to work with, to observe, to try to help and to learn from. He clearly saw it otherwise. He asked to go first in all the exercises so that he could hear how I cued him and worked with him, so that he would understand better how to work with me. That’s a great learning attitude, I thought; he was living up to my lofty expectations. But it also suggested that he was less skilled (or at least less confident) than I am at directing someone else, which is less helpful for me when I am also trying to learn. On top of that he slipped into masculine competitiveness deliberately pushing my flexibility and strength drills further than the teacher instructed, to prove… I don’t know what! He didn’t quite verbalise that he was trying to break me, but it was hovering behind some of his comments and he ‘joked’ about hitting me with the stick if I didn’t work my shoulder flexion hard enough.
The funniest aspect of all this is that I felt relatively good and strong and stable and emotionally unbothered by this in a way my younger yoga self would simply not recognise. Maybe I’m becoming my own yoga hero. That would be nice. Nailing my handstand might be the ostensible aim in this class, but the real gain is something quite different.
babycrowyoga 