Month by month

In my current teaching I’m offering a monthly workshop at the gym where I teach. The manager is stretching the budget to pay for an ‘extra’ and something which is unlike anything else they offer.

I love doing this. It is a privilege. Each month I relish the challenge : how will I choose a topic, and then condense it into something meaningful enough for my students, how to balance some explanation and theory with sufficient time for their own somatic enquiry and felt experience, how to juggle the personalities and individual concerns in the room, and to marry up my interests with their (often very practical) needs?

Each month I feel I more aware of my knowledge and experience, my growing ability as a teacher, the amount of study I have done and the joy of transmitting that to help others and support their practice (and life). It’s amazing and I feel more confident as a teacher than ever before. I have always been aware how little I know in the vastness of yoga, but now this is now more honestly balanced with a sense of how much I know, looking from the other end of the telescope as it were. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, simply to acknowledge the understanding I have developed so far and the skills I am gaining as a teacher. Through this I’m learning to see myself more completely, without so much habitual shrinking and excuses.

And yet each month also I feel a sadness. In these workshops much more than in leading a regular class I feel close to my teacher: I hear his teaching in my teaching, recall things I learned with him, notice the ways I have of communicating and structuring my sessions that owe so much to him yet are now entirely my own. This interplay of relationship between student and teacher, the growth and development, transmission and transition feels so wonderful. And also so sad. I would love to share with him what I am doing, ask advice on some areas I feel uncertain about, play with some ideas to explore the very best presentation for my students, share the joy of my development as a teacher with the person who taught me. But we don’t have that communication available any longer. Last summer right after we talked about lineage, he severed his connection with me. He cut the line. A bitter irony. A paradox I still can’t totally make sense of.

So I am on my own. I am at the front of the room (my room), leading the group, giving it my best. I am the centre of their attention, everyone is listening; my students are eager, polite, curious and everything I could want. I love this, I am proud to share what I can in this community I care for and have grown over the years, and I am so happy when I see a student grasp something new that will help them in some way. I am glad for all this.

And I am also sad.

And as the months pass I notice the sadness shifts incrementally. Now it lacks the overwhelming and bitter feelings of loss of the first months. Now there is sweetness growing in my memories. And in the present moment a tangible sense that I am coming into my own, trusting my own judgement, sensing my students’ needs. I value so much the time of yoga sharing I had with my teacher and to shift away from that is surely the hardest lesson for me. Of course it is bitter-sweet and I’m feeling sad-glad. It takes time, month by month to negotiate and change and shift my identify.

I marvel at the human capacity to hold so much at once. It’s richness beyond my dreams to feel so full, a luxury of feelings perhaps. It’s all that. My teacher taught me the generosity of AND, the fullness of experiencing opposites at once, rather than the restrictions I used to impose on my own experience in my habitual OR or BUT thinking pattern. So now I can feel both glad AND sad.

And on my own now I am coming to realise that my sadness is something beautiful to observe and to honour rather than a feeling to resolve or an experience to push away and try to eradicate. It’s testament to the sweetness and the gladness and all the past joy I experienced in my own yoga learning journey.

Sometimes the fullness and the apparent paradoxes are too much. So that’s where my practice is these days. To be in all of it, as it is. I’m practising the AND.